Testimonials
After founding the ADCE in 2013, and working tirelessly since then, you have made us dream of a better world.
María del Coro Calle (Property sale)
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Arteale, as it has been a great satisfaction to collaborate with this Foundation and with the deeply human projects it has supported to help refugees who have no home in which to settle.
For this reason, after the passing of my father and with my mother’s consent, we decided to donate the temporary usufruct of the empty home in which they had lived until then to the Foundation. This donation proved to be of great help, as when I needed support to care for my mother, Arteale put me in contact with a wonderful Latin American woman who took on those caregiving responsibilities with great affection, care, and professionalism. In view of this and given her need for housing, Arteale decided to provide her with the home we had ceded under usufruct.
Subsequently, when I was hospitalized due to a heart condition and was unable to care for my mother, this woman once again took care of her. When the usufruct donation came to an end, I wished to sell the property. The housing need for this family continued, and with Arteale’s collaboration we proceeded to arrange an installment-based purchase and sale agreement. All the bureaucracy and paperwork that both parties had to complete was facilitated by the Foundation, without which it would have been impossible to carry out this transaction. The outcome has been highly beneficial both for the Latin American family and for myself.
Given the very positive experience I have lived through, and by way of conclusion, I would like to highlight the extremely important role that associations and foundations of this kind play in our society. Their sole purpose is to lend a helping hand to people without resources, and in my view, their contribution should be more widely recognized and supported, with greater assistance from official institutions.
María del Coro Calle.
Alberto and Maria José
(Home owners)
We are used to accompanying complicated processes. End-of-life processes, whether they last for hours, days, months… or years.
It was in this context that we met María José and her mother.
And it turned out that his path was not yet finished. That, setting aside what medicine had indicated for her medical diagnoses in an eagerness to fill any problem with drugs, a full life emerged, awake and capable of enjoying that, LIFE.
And, as I say, that is where we met María José.
And she spoke to us of other complicated processes, of other lives that were seeking to be LIFE.
And we perceived synergies, we felt them. How easy it is to communicate when you share your gaze. When you see the other person from their potential, their individuality, their BEING… When their difficulties, their problems (cognitive deficit, language difficulties, fragility…) are not what defines them. Much less what is definitive.
And we embarked. With all our precautions; the physical distance between our home and our flat, the shortage of time to devote, our elderly parents, our son growing up… All that was put on the back burner when we met them. That meeting… With a translator for words, but with infinite communication. Looks, gestures… It wasn’t a real estate operation. And it wasn’t an act of charity either. It was something else. It is something else.
With our problems of distance, time, child, parents… we attended new meetings where communication grew. And there were differences. And red lines. And rethinking. But with the respect that two families have for each other, weeks, months, years went by… and we continued with the project because we knew it was good for everyone. And Arteale continued to be there to guide us at all times, helping us in our shortcomings and supporting the process, looking at what was best for each family and making it possible for everything to go smoothly.
The process took on a rhythm and life of its own. Arteale maintained a presence that was most evident near the end, when a major crisis unexpectedly arose. I suppose it is not easy to understand a process when you come back to it. And it costs. And it was difficult when a person burst in and upset the balance achieved during all these months. They were moments of worry, of impotence… And once again, communication, presence, patience, quick reflexes, the search for alternatives… all these virtues that Arteale puts into all this made the crisis a time of growth. For everyone.
It would be an understatement to say that we are grateful. We have grown, we have lived, we are » different «. In practical terms; we have kept a flat without losing money and without major worries. And when it all started this was our goal. But this would be an almost absurd reduction. Now we have more friends and fewer prejudices. And that really is a rounded business.
Signed
Alberto and Maria José
Aunt Elena
(Home owner)
I am María José Anitua Trevijano’s aunt and have relied on her as a lawyer for various professional matters for many years.
Dear María José, you asked me how my experience with refugees has been. At first I thought about it a lot because I had never rented the flat. My nephews and nieces had lived there and I kept the house ready in case they needed it. After thinking about it, I said yes, because I was doing charity work. And I was getting some money, which I could also use for some repairs the neighbours wanted to do. But at the same time I was worried about getting it back if I needed it. I needed to have that security, as was reflected in the contract María José made with Arteale.
The relationship with the neighbours was very important to me and that is why the Arteale Foundation took care of talking to most of the neighbours, who did not object to the entry of an Algerian family in a small community and some of the neighbours are family.
In the contract it was written that if there were problems with the community, the refugee family should look for another location. The family had a two-month-old child born in our country and we had a very cordial relationship, but with a small child there were problems with the neighbour downstairs because the small child cried and woke up her granddaughter. And Arteale took care of managing this conflict in a positive way, without me having to do anything.
Then came the Covid-19 pandemic and the family started to have a hard time because they lost their jobs and the rent was reduced a lot, as well as other expenses such as heating, electricity, etc., which I passed on to them as soon as they told me. We have been very happy and I think they have received a big favour. The Arteale Foundation also lent them money.
Once the family left, a neighbour told me that he was glad they were leaving, but other neighbours told me that they had been very good to them.
María José thank you very much for everything and a big hug.
Your aunt
Signed
Aunt Elena
María del Coro Calle Alonso
(Home owner)
In all aspects of my life, I have always been very conscious that for me «trust» is paramount and for this to exist, we must first understand others without any prejudice if we want others to understand us as well.
And I mention this thought because trust has been the basis of my relationship and connection with María José from the first moment I started working for her, being in charge of the care of her two young children, until today, and it is also because of this thought that my family and I decided to collaborate with this wonderful project in which values such as empathy, understood as humanity, trust, calmness, respect for others and respect for the environment we are part of, are fundamental.
We began to collaborate in the project by giving usufruct for two years of the house in which my mother lived alone, a 93-year-old widow, and which had been empty for only 6 months after she broke her hip. We had the option of selling it in mind, but we ruled it out at first because of the work needed on the flat in which my parents, now very old, had lived all their lives.
Far from thinking that the donation and collaboration process would be complicated, due to the renovations and works that the house required and, in addition, the lack of time available due to the continuous care of my mother because of her limited mobility, the process could not have been simpler. Arteale explained it to us very well and provided us with all kinds of facilities: the notary came to our home to sign the transfer, and Arteale also took charge of the renovation work, which has been surprisingly efficient in a short period of time, the cost of which we thought was going to be four times more than what was invested, leaving a very dignified and accessible home.
«It is not just an economic transaction». I perfectly remember my mother’s words when we explained the project to her, we asked her for her opinion on the matter and after listening to them we had no hesitation in collaborating: «And why do I want an empty house? This way it is used, protected and helps other people to build a new life. We all benefit from it».
The first family was mistakenly given the keys prematurely without having finalised the conscious partnership agreement. Arteale quickly became aware of the manipulation of the tenants by continuing the concious agreement. Although problematic, Arteale dealt with the difficult situation and managed to get the family out of the flat after 10 months.
Several families have lived in the flat. Some have left by accessing normal market rental resources.
When María José raised the possibility of taking in a Ukrainian family without going through the process of conscious collaboration, as the owner I did not object, based on the trust I felt in the Arteale Foundation. In the end it was not possible due to the fear of the refugee woman with a daughter few months old, who was living in the house at the time, of sharing it with men.
At the moment there is a family of five whose mother takes care of my mother, the owner of the house, who has been bedridden for more than two years and with whom she has a better relationship than with the other carers.
I would definitely recommend this experience to others, in fact, we have renewed the usufruct for another two years, for all the support received from Arteale, for their follow up and attention, always being aware of what is convenient for the parties, for the integrity, honesty shown and for contributing to a good that benefits the whole society.
It is about going beyond managing a property, it is about helping to evolve as a society, to grow in harmony in order to achieve a balanced, inclusive and sustainable coexistence.
Signed
María del Coro Calle Alonso
Testimony Refugee Family
First of all, we would like to thank the ARTE ALE Foundation for the support and closeness we have felt throughout the entire process.
We are a family composed of my wife and our two children, and we were the first family to participate in the pilot conscious renting project aimed at supporting immigrant families.
Our journey alongside the Arte Ale Foundation began in 2018 in a reception apartment. Due to our circumstances, we found ourselves having to move several times between different apartments intended for families in situations similar to ours. Despite the difficulties that moving always entails, we consistently had the support of the Foundation.
Throughout this entire process, we have always felt supported and have maintained close contact with the president of the Foundation, María José Anitua, whether through meetings, shared meals, or other moments.
Based on this relationship, during a meeting to discuss our current situation, María José asked whether we had ever considered the possibility of applying for a mortgage. At that time, it seemed difficult due to my wife’s part-time job. However, knowing that we would have the Foundation’s guidance and support, my wife began looking for another job. She was then offered a better position with improved salary conditions. We informed María José of this new situation and, after giving it some thought, we felt encouraged to begin searching for a home.
The Foundation advised us on where to look and what aspects we should consider before entering into negotiations. During the search, several options were ruled out due to negative indicators.
After several months of searching, we found a property that we liked after visiting it. The Foundation then contacted the real estate agency, and negotiations for the property began. We were informed that the Arte Ale Foundation would grant us a credit line of €20,000 to help finance the purchase.
They also provided us with legal advice, as we were unfamiliar with this type of process, including the drafting of the deposit contract, the private purchase agreement, and the public deed. They also informed us about the consequences of purchasing a property with potential hidden defects. In fact, during a second visit to the property—after the deposit contract had already been signed—we discovered dampness hidden behind some wardrobes. The Foundation advised us that this issue would be mentioned in the public deed so that the seller would later assume the costs of repairing the damage. This was not easy, as the seller was initially unwilling to take responsibility.
Additionally, the Foundation helped us manage the donation of furniture and household items that we did not have or that were in poor condition in the property. They also assisted us in coordinating with a company to repair the damp wall at an affordable price.
For all this and much more, we would like to thank the Arte Ale Foundation for all the support our family has received. We wish them great success in their new projects, helping more families like ours who need support, whether for renting or purchasing a home.
Kind regards.
Thank you very much.
Testimony of the first Ukrainian refugees hosted
I would like to express my gratitude to Mrs. Maria José. My son and I received a roof over our heads and support. The team of the Arteale association took care of us at every step and in every need. We are very ashamed of the way we have been treated, even in the smallest way.
ALL OF THIS IS UNEXPECTED AND VERY HARD TO BELIEVE BUT THANK GOD IT IS REAL.
After the welcome received and in gratitude, they decided to collaborate with the Arteale Foundation by assembling a bunk bed for the reception flat.
Second Ukrainian refugee family hosted
Thank you, Maria Jose and Arteale, for this house that we have felt like ours. We are truly thankful.
Maria Jose Anitua
(promoter of EHC)
They said that they were so grateful that they were ashamed. After thinking about it, this comment made us ask for their testimonies and their support in assembling the bunk bed that we have bought for the ocassion.
Ukrainian translator
As a translator, it is the first time that I see anything like this, when they come here, they get a place to stay and all the suppport they need. Honestly, I reaffirm my gratitude for the solidarity shown with the Ukrainian people.
Testimonial Pablo Piñeiro
For me, the Conscious Collaborative Accords has been much more than simply signing an agreement between both parties. It has been a process of self-discovery, as well as a reflection on what I expect from myself and from others.
As it is both a legal and, to some extent, a holistic process, I have felt throughout that I am a fundamental part of the agreement. This is not about “committing to legal and collaborative terms”; it is about understanding each person’s strengths and weaknesses, and using that awareness to move together in the same direction, with the goal of achieving a shared and positive outcome for all parties involved.
Testimonial Javier
Testimonial Ricardo Romo
David Parejo
The Conscious Collaborative Accords have been a great discovery and an amazing process to experience work/life balance.
The whole process was and still is a reconnection journey to get to know María José and her project on a true co-creative adventure.
I love the holistic approach integrating solid tools like the TKI together with flexible principles and methodologies such as Agile Lean, Appreciative Inquiry and Design Thinking. I want to be honest and remark that I was a bit reluctant in the beginning and I did not pay the attention that TKI questionnaires deserve. As the process went on, I understood the importance and the information that they can show to overcome archetypes and the challenges that they bring to the table. They are 'key' elements and a very important piece of the whole puzzle.
I really enjoyed the game of values and the personal interactions with María José helping to be aligned as well as shaping our own connection. It was amazing to feel we have similar dreams and the power of the collective to achieve common goals and results, making true that 'We are not alone!'
During my career in the corporate world in executive positions and as a company owner and entrepreneur, I've always valued the power of relationships to nurture healthy and long term partnerships. At some point, we sort of lost view of that essence and focused a little bit too much on the goal and the power and control dynamics. We forgot about the human factor and our humanness.
I have been seeking for so long to reconnect with that original purpose and I am deeply grateful to have found María José who is a living example and has spent most of her life with a collaborative mindset and has been a great catalyst to bring the Conscious Collaborative Accords as powerful tools to facilitate the transition from the old obsolete competitive-like model into a collaborative connections fostering a more natural and regenerative way of living.
I am happy to be part of this amazing journey on a 'Thinking Big' and 'Deep' project like this. Deep Feeling of Gratitude, 'DFoG' .
Iñigo Benedicto
(CCA Collaborator)
We wanted to renew our company’s partnership pact and the process has been tremendously inspiring. It has led to a calm, honest and empathetic conversation that has allowed us, after so many years, to understand each other better in good times and bad and to bond even more. We use the values game with our new hires and it has just helped us make bold strategic decisions with surprising fluidity.
Santiago Barrueco
(CCA Collaborator)
A fantastic tool that allows you to know yourself and be known for real.
Glenn Meier
(CCA Collaborator)
The CCA process is an easy and fun way to develop relationships with others quickly. By going through the CCA process when I first collaborated with EHC, I quickly integrated with the team. They understood important things about me, and I knew important things about them. Throughout our collaboration, we referred back to things that came up in our CCA. It is an amazing tool for collaborative relationships!
Maria Cuba
(CCA Collaborator)
There are times in our lives when we are lucky enough to be presented with an opportunity to be part of something transformative, powerful and in service of the greater good. A few months ago I was presented with such an opportunity when I met Maria Jose and the Empty Homes Collaborative Project. I have always been concerned with the challenges that people face, particularly disenfranchised individuals and families, when it comes to finding a secure and dignified home. As
someone who grew up without the privilege of homeownership, I know too well the feeling of insecurity and fear that comes from living in places that always feel temporary and with no sense of belonging. This is why when I learned about EHC I didn't only feel compelled to learn more, I knew I wanted to be part of it. However, homelessness is often viewed as a numbers problem, and when it comes to solutions we are often met with a pragmatic approach that while it may be rooted in results it is also stripped of a humane perspective. The fact that EHC has seen beyond that and has created a human first approach with their Collaborative and Conscious agreements is what sets it apart and what brings much needed empathy, dignity and compassion to the process. I was amazed at how each step of the agreements brought a powerful new way to understand and view the process and the solutions and changes that we aim to create. Not only did I learn about EHC, the people and families they aim to serve and the complexity of the issues, but I also learned about my place in this journey, the opportunity to contribute and the feelings
and beliefs that it nurtured. Maria Jose and her EHC team are doing work that is fundamental to finding new paths and sustainable solutions for addressing the homelessness problem, but in turn they are also ontributing to better societies, a healthy environment, reducing climate impact, and building collaborative communities. This is how we will achieve solutions, with innovation, open minds, but most of all, TOGETHER!
Iñaki Zabala
(Euskal Air)
Although I was surprised by María José Anitua’s request, given the time that has elapsed in relation to her professional work as a legal advisor to Euskal Air (1991 / 1992), I am pleased to be able to help her, given the justification for her request: the new challenge of public-private collaboration in the reuse of empty houses.
I was managing director when she joined the airline Euskal Air S.A., which operated under the trade name of Nort Jet. The company was founded at the beginning of 1989 at the instigation of the Provincial Council of Alava and the Chamber of Commerce of Alava, to operate regular flights from Vitoria Airport.
The capital was mainly Basque. Most of it belonged to three banks in this region. On 14 April 1992 it ceased operations after three years. The closure was due to the Basque government’s failure to provide the capital that was available and to the fact that the aircraft were not as profitable as expected. This experience was an important learning experience.
In the negotiations with the Basque Government, María José Anitua played an important role, holding several meetings with the then Deputy Minister of the Basque Government, Fernando Buesa, with whom she had previously worked. Although the negotiations did not produce the desired results, I would like to highlight María José’s perseverance, honesty, involvement and positive attitude in the search for viable solutions.
She worked as a team with me and the company’s CEO, Lázaro Ros, in a situation of extreme financial difficulty. A climate of deep trust was generated, to the point of offering her to become a part-owner, in order to avoid bankruptcy.
This trust has continued in other professional assignments in which her help and negotiating skills have been successfully concluded.
I recommend María José for her professional career and excellent management in this area of public-private collaboration, despite not achieving the desired objectives in the case of Euskal Air.
Ramón Bernal Uribarrena
(Funko)
Dear Sir/Madam
We hereby wish to acknowledge the experience that our organisation, FUNKO, Confederation of Foundations of the Basque Country, has had with María José Anitua, during the time she served as the organisation’s Technical Secretary.
FUNKO, as representative of the foundation sector in the Basque Country, maintains an active collaboration with the Basque Government department that regulates the Protectorate of Foundations. It is a relevant interlocutor, developing a continuous public-private collaboration, which facilitates offering a better context for organisations to develop their social aims.
In this task, during 2016, Maria José Anitua collaborated with FUNKO in the revision of the draft of the new Foundations Law that was to be approved in the Basque Country. Different articles were identified that, with the definition they had in the draft, could cause problems in the management and an intense work was done to put forward proposals to solve the problems indicated.
After active negotiation, in which Maria José Anitua played an important role, an agreement was reached on the new wording of the draft amendment to the Law, proving the good result of the management carried out.
All of this recognises the appropriate management carried out in this area of public-private collaboration between FUNKO and the Basque Government’s Protectorate of Foundations, in which Maria José Anitua played an important role.
Signed
Ramón Bernal Uribarrena
Currently FUNKO Board Member, President for the years 2016 to 2021.
Jesús Alfredo Ispizua Zuazua
(Basque Government)
Jesús Alfredo Ispizua Zuazua, professionally a civil servant of the Basque Government, currently holding the post of head of legal advice in the Directorate of Social Economy (Department of Labour and Employment), states, at the request of the interested party and for the purposes invoked by her, that he has known María José Anitua professionally during the performance of her duties as head of the legal advice area of the Directorate of Administrative Registers and Local Regime of the Department responsible for foundations (then Department of the Interior, Justice and Public Administration).
In this regard, it should be borne in mind that the Spanish constitution recognises the right of foundation for purposes of general interest, in accordance with the law, article 34.1. In the case of the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country (ACBC) it is currently, Law 9/2016, of 2 June, on Foundations of the Basque Country, article 1 of which defines the foundation as a private asset, permanently affected to the realisation of purposes of general interest.
The ACBC is responsible, among other functions, for the registration of those foundations to which it is applicable.
Amongst the acts subject to registration, the act of constitution is of special legal relevance. The formalisation of the constitutive act, its organic and functional design, as well as the specification of the activities to be carried out and the economic regime to which it is subject, – independently of the important tax effects derived from it – is usually complex for people who are willing to allocate private assets to general interest purposes; all the more so when multiple founders concur in the articulation of the same general interest. For this reason, the work of legal advisors is decisive for its legal formalisation.
In this sense, María José Anitua, in a specific case of particular complexity, and as a representative and legal advisor of private interests, has carried out an excellent professional activity, in my opinion, with singular professional expertise, bringing about its alignment and conjunction with the general interest, for its formal legal configuration as a foundation in accordance with the autonomous foundational regulations in force at the time.
Signed
Jesús Alfredo Ispizua Zuazua
Interview by Miel A. Elustondo to Refugee family 1
Refugee family awaiting asylum in collaborative rental agreement.
“Things that we never thought in our lives would happen, have happened to us”.
It is difficult to understand the situation of refugee families who already live among us, who share our lives, concerns and the comings and goings of the society we share. In the case of the family that has received us in their home in Vitoria-Gasteiz. They arrived in our city in March 2019 fleeing from fear, and even here, they must maintain their anonymity out of fear….
Miel A. Elustondo – zaldi ero
You started talking about fear…
He: Where we come from there are many things that are unbelievable, literally unbelievable. We ourselves were terrified. When we arrived here, half a year ago, I had the habit of looking from one side to the other, fearing that someone would attack us. My family was already telling me: “Don’t worry, we are not there anymore! Most of all, our eldest son: “Dad, stop! stop!”. There is that fear.
She: And even more now, with social networks, everything expands in a second. It’s not like before, when it was very difficult for information to reach other places. Now it is no longer like that. We’ve seen too many cases.
He: These criminals have so much money, so many arms, so many tentacles! So much that, in our country, they have infiltrated people in Interpol to have knowledge and know where generals and people of that rank are! If they can even do that, what can happen to you!
She: Corruption is there. You file a claim, and the police themselves pass on information to them, to the criminals.
Why did you leave your country?
He: For fear that they would kill us, that they would kill my wife and children. [He points to a news item on his computer and reads us two headlines. The first one reads: “Arrested a violent hitman leader who traveled to Spain to expand in Europe”; the second one: “Capture of Interpol agent exposes corruption of the Urabeños in Colombia”]. In our country there is something called the bacrim, which are criminal gangs. In the big cities there are criminal gangs that operate as if they were a network, they are connected. They are taken as the biggest cartel in South America. In the neighborhoods they do what they call drug micro-trafficking, and they also charge vaccines.
Vaccines?
He: If you have a business, or a good quality of life, they find out. They come to you, knock on your door, and say, “You, from now on, are going to help us”. They say they are going to protect you. That is like their saying, because what are they going to protect us from, if not from themselves?
She: “I am going to protect you, but if you don’t pay me in money, you pay me with the life of one of your relatives”. That is what they want to say.
He: It happened that they came to me and told me that. An example: you earn a hundred euros, so you plan your life to live on those hundred euros. When someone comes and tells you that you have to give him fifteen of those hundred euros, your finances become unbalanced, because you have bills to pay, for example. In fact, I had started a business, which was going well, because we worked hard on it, but that does not mean that you had millions, because that is not so, because I owed money to the banks. But the thing is that the business was growing, and then, these people came to charge me. Little by little, finances began to tighten, and that’s what they always told me, that if I didn’t pay them, they would charge me with my family’s blood. When I saw that situation, I thought I had to look for an alternative. And my alternative was not to go to the police, because we saw that they talked to the police. The police have them vaccinated, they charge them taxes.
She: The police know that this network exists, but to let them work, the gangs pay the police.
Him: So I began to see that the situation had no future. I started to think about what to do. Go to another city? It’s the same thing, because the bacrim are connected! As I strangled myself economically, I had to get out of everything: I had to sell the business, the car… I asked for credit in the banks, and with that money we left. I could ask the banks for credit to pay the gangs, but there will come a time when I will not be able to pay back the money to the banks, nor will they lend me more, and then the gangs will come to execute me. There is no other way. It had already happened where we lived. What happens is that you never think it will happen to you. The owner of the butcher’s shop, they killed him.
She: And the one at the funeral home was attacked. Like the story of “it got dark, and the Lord did not dawn”.
He: We brought our children with us, supposedly on vacation… I have to say that I didn’t even tell my wife about these things, but she noticed.
She: Yes, I said that something was going on because he was strange. I asked him: “What’s going on with the money, why are you selling everything?
Him: I never told them anything because I didn’t want to fill them with fear. And at work I never said anything to anyone, because you don’t know who knows who. And, besides, who is going to be next to a person who at any moment, if he doesn’t pay, they are going to kill him. Even the ladies who have arepas shops have to pay!
She: For example, my son always asked for a trip to Paris, as a quinceañero [Quinceañero, a “coming of age” that is celebrated with great jubilation in different Latin American countries]. That trip was planned a long time before. We tried to stick to the plan. The children were not told anything. We arrived in Barcelona, and four days later, we had to talk to them. And that’s when our daughter went into depression.
He: After Barcelona, we spent about four months in Paris, and later we came to Vitoria, through a friend of my wife.
She: We had to find a way out, we had to survive any way we could. I told my husband that I was going to talk to a friend I knew was here, in Vitoria. It had been many years since I had spoken to her, I told her we were going to Valencia. She thought we were on vacation. She told us to stay with her for a few days and then we would go on to Valencia, because they said that there were many more people from all over, that we could sell empanadas, as we did in Paris… And we liked it here very much, we thought it was very nice… I started to talk to my husband, that we had to ask for help, but we were afraid. In fact, initially, my husband went to the police by himself. Then we all went, because they told him he had to bring his whole family. So, we all went and the whole process started here. It had been a week from the time we arrived until we went to the police.
At some point you contacted Arteale and Arcem?
She: We started looking for an apartment here, in real estate agencies or on the street. But we don’t have any documents other than our passports. And they told us no. My friend said to rent an apartment in her name, but you don’t want to cause problems for people. So, I thought of telling the whole truth to a real estate lady. Her name is Inés, an angel sent by God. I told her everything that was happening, she told me to come the next day at such and such hour, that she was going to talk to a friend, a property owner, to see if she could help us. She said she was a very busy person, but let’s see! He gave us an address, we went and that’s how we met María José [Anitua], from Arteale, who provided us with the apartment. Through Arteale, we contacted Arcem. But they told us that if they helped us one hundred percent, it turned out that we could be left without Arteale’s apartment, that they could send us to other cities, where they could place us… It was like starting again from scratch. And we, after having been super-displaced, super-stressed… and already having an apartment… we said no. Having an apartment was for us like living again. Not to start again. For our daughter, the change here [Europe] was horrible. Once in Vitoria, she started to feel better. She draws very beautifully. When we were in Paris, her drawings reflected sadness. When we arrived here, her drawings changed.
You signed a collaborative rental contract with Arteale. How was that process?
He: We are immersed in that process. For us it is something new. Arteale, as its name says, is art, and that’s why we have to express our idea of the contract in a drawing. We have to be very natural. It’s not a normal type of contract, you pay a fee and that’s it. We are used to that. But in this case, it’s not like that.
She: We thought it was a nice thing that we could contribute with our drawings, with our vision. We are used to being very independent, and the fact that our children could contribute their vision with their drawings, that they could be part of the project, seemed very nice to us. Then it became difficult for us, because it is like putting an idea on paper, and that is difficult. But we have been learning how to do it. DRAWINGS The vision, the mission, the touchstone, the red lines?
He: There it is defining what you can and can’t do. We have liked that from the very first moment, making things clear. It’s very good for me to mark how far you can go. What has made the process more difficult for us is that we forgot the appointments, the meetings. They may think that we are making ourselves look bad because we want to, but that is not the case. For us it is very important to do things well and we are incredibly grateful to Arteale, because Arteale opened its doors to us as soon as we arrived. Arteale helps us with housing, and is a bridge for everything else. At no time has it ever crossed our minds to be in bad taste with them, with Arteale. That’s what made the whole process more difficult for us. She: We are so stressed, so stressed, that when we had to go to the police to make the request and everything, we left our passports at home.
He: We have all the documents super organized, both originals and copies, passports and health cards… Everything. And that day we were going to the police we left our papers at home! We are correct people, accomplished, but we have looked bad in front of Arteale more than once, for getting our appointments wrong. The last time it happened, I sat on the couch half in despair, trying to understand what was happening to us: “Why is this happening to us over and over again if we supposedly have things under control?” I started to do a self-examination, trying to visualize the situation. During the day I have nothing else to do but go to study. Unconsciously, my brain is always thinking about the future, the past, the current condition… it’s always on. I have in there what the lawyer told us, that many refugee families have been denied their asylum request. Everything is uncertain… Our son is not studying. Me, I keep my mind busy, because otherwise I’m always thinking: “What if…? And what if…”. It is enough to be denied the papers to be blocked, because you become marginalized, because you become undocumented and you no longer have the option to offer your children a university, a future, nor to offer them my help, my same potential…. Everything remains there, with no road to travel. At the moment all we do is, after applying for asylum papers at the police, wait six months until they give it to us or not. I hope it all comes together, because in six months I am finishing my studies here. And what if it doesn’t? All that keeps me in a labyrinth, with my mind very congested, trying to visualize the future and some emergency exit… What would happen if we were not granted asylum? What would happen to Arteale’s project? Because we are a project… We live in fear of going through again what we went through before coming here. We don’t have any stability, we are very stressed. Her: The only good thing we have is that we have an apartment, a house. When we walked into this house we couldn’t believe it. When Arteale put the keys on the table for us, I couldn’t believe it. “Is this happening?” Because it’s one thing to tell it and another thing to live it. One has one’s comforts, one’s house, one’s life… Arriving in Paris was sleeping in a kitchen, in a living room… Then at my friend’s house. She had a dog in a room and she had it fitted out for us… I thank her in my soul, but arriving here was…
He: Getting into this house was a lottery, literally! Things that we never, ever, ever in our lives thought would happen, have happened to us. From one moment to the next, life gives you a 180-degree turn that you are left, literally, in hinopia. Like that, literally. Because we didn’t even have a bed, we had a mat on the floor [floor].
Her: The friend I’m talking about does nails, at her house, and she was there with her friends at nine, ten, eleven o’clock at night. And until they left, one could not go to bed, because it was the room where she worked, and where we went to bed.
He: Or he would tell us: “Tomorrow someone is coming, she is coming very early, you have to pick up the room very early”… I feel that we are like provisional, waiting for the resolution of the police, waiting, to ask for the work permit later. That’s when I will feel like I can step on the ground. That we can work and depend on ourselves.
Interview by Miel A. Elustondo to Refugee family 2
Anonymous testimony
Hope and illusion, the journey of a refugee family.
They arrived in Vitoria-Gasteiz in July 2018. They openly state that in their country they had many problems, “because of terrorism”. He was a policeman, he had been working as such for seven years, and in the area he was responsible for monitoring and patrolling, cases of terrorism were happening. They decided to leave their country.
Miel A. Elustondo – zaldi ero
He was receiving death threats, urging him to quit his job as a policeman. He says it was nothing personal, that there was no other reason to threaten him, other than his job. “It was the case for many of my colleagues. My wife and I decided we couldn’t go on like this, so we applied for a visa to leave the country as tourists.” A permit that, in reality, is only valid for a fortnight or a month.
The couple in question flew from their country to Madrid. She was two months pregnant. After landing in Madrid, they went to Bilbao “because we had heard that people were treated well in the Basque Country. We had no friends or acquaintances, but in our minds, we had the idea of applying for asylum. That was clear to us. We left our country with that idea”. In Bilbao, they went to the CEAR office, where they presented their case and their intention to apply for asylum. “We told them our story, and they told us about their asylum program – aid, housing, etc. – from the beginning of our application until we received the response from Madrid. We did it all without anyone accompanying us. Until we contacted CEAR we had no help of any kind. We made that journey alone, my wife and I, always alone. And we didn’t know a word of Spanish either. We didn’t know how to say anything other than ‘Hello,’ thank goodness they had translators at CEAR,” he says. However, in addition to their mother language, they know how to speak both French and English.
Following CEAR’s program, they stayed for two months in a hotel in Derio (Bizkaia). They say they did nothing: “Eating, sleeping, sitting, walking and, above all, waiting, nothing but waiting until they got an answer to officially enter CEAR’s foster care program. In that same hotel there were people who had been waiting for six or seven months for an answer. We met, for example, a girl from Georgia who had been waiting for a year and two months for an answer. In the end they received it, and we know that they are now in A Coruña. We keep in touch with them. In the case of our protagonists, it didn’t take so long to receive the answer to their application. “We received it after two and a half months. They told us that they would send us to Vitoria-Gasteiz, where we would live in an apartment, within the CEAR program, although we would share the housing. They bought our bus ticket in Bilbao and sent us here. Accem people were waiting for us at the bus station and took us to an apartment. There was an empty room there that we occupied, and that’s where the host program really began. It was October 9, 2018,” they note, in closing. They shared an apartment with different people: a couple from Ukraine, a girl from Colombia and another one also from Ukraine. According to the first phase of the reception program, they had to reside for six months in that first house in Vitoria-Gasteiz and then receive the relevant aid, always managed by Accem: “Apart from other aid, they provided us with housing and helped us financially, for six months, with 50 euros per month for each adult member of the family. In that six-month period we had to find housing for our family, counting that we would receive an allowance of 560 euros to pay the rent and another 560 euros to subsist, to buy food and everything else: a total of 1,150 euros for everything”. And that is how they faced the arduous task of renting housing, without achieving their goal. “Renting housing is very difficult. People don’t want to rent their housing to any foreigners, or people with small children…. On the other hand, rents are expensive. They can cost 600 or 700 euros, so we could not find any apartment, and Accem extended the first phase, one month after the other, four months more, until we found the apartment we occupy now, the one in Arteale, through Accem. An apartment in the heart of the city, on San Antonio Street. And they tell us first-hand about their conscious rental experience. “The first time we met, the lawyer from Accem and María José [Anitua], from Arteale, participated in addition to us. That day, we talked about various topics in general. After that, we began to meet once a week and, later, once a fortnight. The aim was none other than to get to know each other, build trust, work on our values, establish limits or red lines…. We began by explaining how we had tried to find a rental property. We had a list of the real estate agencies we had visited, and another one of the rental apartments advertised on the Internet. All the landlords asked for a paycheck, a bank guarantee -sometimes-, and things that were impossible for us”. After holding some joint sessions, each of our characters had individual meetings with María José Anitua. “Yes, and so we kept talking about the values, about how we were going to manage the situation in case there were problems with the neighbors, about this and that… For a month and twenty days we talked about everything, in three-hour meetings. The meetings were perfect for building trust between Arteale and us. In reality, there was no difficulty other than the language, because we did not master it.” In the case of the woman, she did not start studying Spanish until September 2019, because of her pregnancy and subsequent motherhood.
They served their allotted period living in the Accem apartment until another family occupied it. Faced with the situation, Arteale somewhat accelerated the conscious rental process. “In the end we were conceded the apartment and we ‘premiered’ it on July 4, 2019, Thursday. We remember it well because it was all one: finish the Accem contract, pick up the things and come in here, to sleep… And it was great, it was really great. When they told us we were going to move into this house, it was phenomenal. After nine months of living in a room, and with a newborn son, it was very good for us. It is a very good apartment, in the heart of the city. It’s almost a dream to get this apartment, and at this price!”. Both are very grateful to Arteale. In any case, before moving into the apartment they currently occupy, they made their presentation to the community. To do so, they held a neighbors’ meeting. “We talked with them, in case problems arose, because in this community everyone is from Vitoria-Gasteiz, a foreigner has never lived there. It went very well. And so far we haven’t had any problems. We have been here since July [the interview was done in December 2019] and I still don’t know the neighbor. They say she is an old lady, but we don’t know her.”
No to the asylum application
Since they arrived in Vitoria-Gasteiz in October 2018, they immediately started studying Spanish in Accem courses. Then, he completed different courses both theoretical and practical, and started working in a warehouse in Jundiz. “The first six months we didn’t have a work permit, just the red card. On June 7, 2019, I was given the work permit, just when I was doing an internship in a company in Jundiz. I finished the contract, received the work permit – temporary, to be renewed every six months – and started working: things came one after the other.” As far as she was concerned, she did a practical course in a bakery, and was about to start working in the same place. And just when they had housing and work, they received a call from Accem: they were going to deny them the right to asylum they were requesting. Back to the beginning. “If they deny us asylum, they take away everything: the work permit, the red card… everything! We will be left with nothing, and out of the asylum program. Arteale has already told us that, even if we run out of help, he will help us pay the rent for housing and also provide us with help to eat.” But this is not the solution they are pursuing. “We don’t want to depend on help from anyone, the city council or whoever. It doesn’t make sense that two people who have been working, have to resort to aids because they have been denied permission. This situation doesn’t make us feel good. He has been working for more than six months and maintains good relations with his colleagues. And she is also excited, ready to start working. “And, now, they tell us that they are going to deny us asylum, that they are going to take everything from us… and they don’t explain why. All we have to do is wait. Wait and wait… As soon as we receive the notification, we will have to stop working. We have already been told that Arteale will help us to manage the help from the city council, and if that help is not enough, Arteale is planning another way to help us. We will have a loan to help us get by until we obtain residency. We’ve been here a year and a half now, and the law requires a three-year stay to get residency. Then we can go back to work with a contract. That’s their plan, that’s their hope.
Interview by Miel A. Elustondo to Alberto Melendez and M. J Almaraz. Owners of Empty Home in EHC project.
Alberto Meléndez and María José Almaraz
“Our son takes care that, whatever happens,
this family has a place to live ”
Alberto and María José are owners of one of the apartments that a refugee family from Afghanistan occupies for rent. They had an empty house that they kept so they could have it in case of need. They did not imagine that this apartment was indeed going to help cover needs, but not their own, but that of an Afghan family.
How does your participation in this project begin?
Alberto: We had an apartment that we occasionally gave to various people, and it was occupied for some periods of time, temporarily and temporarily. But we had no intention of doing business with him. We wanted to keep him, just in case, in case our son [Carlos] or his in-laws needed him. On the other hand, it seemed absurd to have it empty. So, one day, talking to María José [Anitua], she told us about this project of conscious contracts. It was all very natural. It seemed to us a simple process, in which, in addition, we could include our possible floor needs. Impossible easier! We were already told that the rental price was going to be below the market price, but we also did not have an urgent need for money. We were excited that the house was used by people who really needed it, so everything fit together very well.
María José: María José [Anitua] made it very easy for us. We did not have another project for that house, and it seemed nice to help others, while they helped us. It was reciprocal. And we already knew the difficulties that refugees go through.
A.: We sensed that they were not having a good time, but we did not really know their difficulties. We never even imagined them. In this sense, this relationship has involved a knowledge of its reality. On the other hand, many of our family performances are based on trust, and that also helped us to participate in the project that María José [Anitua] presented to us.
Tell us a little about trust. What does it mean? What does it mean to you? …
A.: Due to our work, throughout the week we interact with many people and that makes us learn to know people, without judging them, but knowing them. And María José [Anitua] inspired a lot of confidence in us. She herself is the initiator of the project, the first owner to offer her apartment for rent to refugee families. That says a lot in your favor. And I even remember a day when he called us very early in the morning saying that we were aborting the [rental] operation, that we were not going ahead, that the family we had assigned had problems to solve before we could rent our home. I want to say that María José [Anitua] pampers us, takes care of us, and that is a guarantee.
And how do you remember the first encounter with the refugee family?
A.: We live outside of Vitoria-Gasteiz, in a town, so we are not very to come and go to meetings and commitments there. But the first day we met the refugee family, it was spectacular, because it meant the fall of many prejudices. And a feeling of normality …!
M.J .: Naturally, I would say. After all, it is a family like ours, a family. Although I remember that that first day we communicated with the help of a translator. Now it is different, because they communicate in Spanish, and the two children they have here do well in Spanish.
A.: There were two key people in facilitating this communication: two Accem workers, one lawyer and the other social worker.
M.J .: They made us that first bridge, they brought us closer to the family.
A.: I remember it with voices. I don’t remember the translator communicating anything to me. I remember that I was communicating with them. It was spectacular. They were very grateful, and I was a little worried that they were so grateful, considering that they were solving a problem for us, that of the empty house. Saying thank you so many times doesn’t seem fair, but they already see all the possibilities that open up for them with a flat. Otherwise it would be terrible. I also have very much in mind the pain with which they speak of their country, of what is happening in Afghanistan … The house they occupy now is close to the train tracks, and our concern was that the noise of the train bothered them, but they they said it clearly, what they heard at home, in their country, was the noise of the bombs. “The noise of the train is music,” they translated for us.
Do things from their country count? “The noise of the bombs”, you said …
A .: We have to be very respectful of them. We cannot take photos of them, for example, nor do we harass them with questions about the situation in Afghanistan. There is much suffering in his eyes. And, for example, their children have not been schooled and have been confined at home for fear of the Taliban. The two children who are here with them, arrived here at 14 and 16 years old, and they had never attended school there! Get here, and in ten months they are on the course that corresponds to them, and one of them, the eldest, taking marks!
M.J .: We have been told that in Afghanistan they did not send their children to school because the Taliban showed up there and took both boys and girls. They also told us that music is prohibited …
A .: They are normal people, people who could be born in Vitoria-Gasteiz, people who had their profession, their way of life, and who, nevertheless, had to flee their country because their lives were in danger.
M.J .: They have two more children, older, who left Afghanistan three or four years before the rest of the family, and have lived those years without news of them. When the family finally came here and managed to contact the two elders, they lifted a huge weight off their shoulders.
A .: When we asked them how many children they had from the beginning, they did not answer clearly. Now it is something else, now they openly comment on it. They have two with them here, and two others, older, who left Afghanistan before them and are in Europe. In that sense, our communication has been normalized.
What do you think of the way to formalize the conscious contract? And the contract itself?
A .: This contract you understand, it is not the typical contract with clauses and annexes and a lot of small print that you can never read. In this case, the conscious contract is not a normal contract, it is elaborated together, each one indicates their values, their vision, the red lines, the economic agreement … and at what time, how and with whom should we speak in the case if a problem arises. It is still paper, a simple thing, but Arteale makes us read it, drawings included.
M.J. Anitua: They told us that it was possible that problems would arise, due to this type of contract, when requesting the register, the deposit of the deposit, etc. and we formalized a written contract, but both the padrón office and the Basque Government accepted it without problems, so we will continue to use the contract in comic format.
M.J .: I think that for them it is much better that way, because the problem was the language. The graphic expression is understood by all of us.
A .: They were very obvious things. We had the feeling that we were explaining red lines, but convinced that we will already make those red lines not appear, that we will already look for solutions. Our situation is one of power, and, in any case, it does not seem appropriate to me to be very strict with these refugee families, in need of housing and who are going to show themselves willing to sign whatever it takes to have a house to live. When there is agreement and a willingness to understand each other it is easier. What would have happened if this family did not accept our red lines? Maybe we would not have followed the contract either …
M.J. Anitua: The process of this conscious contract helps build trust. Without that trust, putting nothing but legality ahead, the deal may not have been possible. The fact that the two parties know each other is also very important, because it helps to build trust.
A .: It is true, because when we met them, everything changed. In case of need, I see myself looking for a flat to meet our needs, before going around bothering this refugee family to leave our home, as stated in the contract.
How have you worked on the values, the vision, the mission, the touchstone …?
A .: In our case, we did not have much time, so Arteale bridged the gap between the refugee family and us, although our needs and red lines appear in the contract.
M.J .: We point out some very simple things: respect for the neighbors, be careful with the music, animals not …
M.J. Anitua: Among the red lines, for example, it was included that in the event that the owners needed to dispose of the apartment, taking into account that María José’s parents are older and the case may be, the family that occupies that apartment I would agree to leave it. Accem did not welcome this point, did not want the refugee family to accept it, because legality does not contemplate it. However, the refugee family, as soon as they understood that the case of need would come from María José’s older parents, understood it. Also, it is not that they have to leave the apartment and stay on the street. No. But they may have to move up to three times from home, until they find the right one for their needs, because it is not easy to accommodate a family of four in a Vitoria-Gasteiz where the rent is skyrocketing.
M.J .: It is hard for me to understand so much gratitude. It is true that, on the one hand, it corresponds to us, we have the right to it, but it is like when we reviewed the contract. Over and over reviewing the contract! “Okay, we are crushing them!” I said. “We are crushing them.” It was excessive. And, furthermore, what Alberto says is true, that we have certain power, because we have no need to rent the house, and, on the other hand, they do.
A .: We think that this appreciation will be normalized, without further ado. I remember that soon after settling in the flat, I went there for something, and asked them how they were. “All right, all right … No hot water,” they told me. “What do you mean ‘not hot water’?” They had been without water for a week, simply because they hadn’t hit the boiler switch! Seven days without hot water, and they didn’t even call us! It coincided that I went, if not, they would continue saying “All good, all good!”, Although in reality not everything went well.
M.J .: Now, as we have been through that experience, we insist, because between those who do not understand, and the language is a barrier, and they say to everyone that “Yes, yes, yes!”, You know that there are things that they have not understood. So, you say to yourself, “Let’s start again from the beginning.” Her children are schooled here, they already speak Spanish, and they act as interpreters among us. The parents immediately asked us for a television, to become familiar with the language. Children, meanwhile, never miss class, they are super responsible. They keep the mail, the invoices … everything! They are super respectful.
Today you have gathered in your house, but you have also been in his. You have a certain relationship …
M.J .: Yes, we have gone to his house more than once, and every time you go they receive you with tea, nuts, cake … Everything. And, in addition, you take home a rice tupper or part of the bread that they have made themselves at home …
M.J. Anitua: And through all this process of mutual knowledge, a relationship almost like a family is born, something different arises.
A .: There are times when they tell you about their needs. For example, they could use some bikes, because they move a lot. We could go to the store and buy them, but that is not the relationship we want to have with them, a power or paternalistic relationship. The point is not to buy them a bus voucher or the pool card, but to teach them how to get around on the bus, or to enter the networks of civic centers. We look for other ways to help you meet your needs.
M.J .: Or the mother, for example, tells us that she would need a friend. They would like to have more time with us to learn to go to the mountains, or to walk to the swamp, or to the park of Judizmendi, but we have the time we have, which is not much either.
A .: They make a lot of life together. When you go to his house, if the four are not there, there are three, and the fourth is that he is in class. In one of his drawings that is precisely what appears: a house, with a path that resembles a place to walk …
M.J .: Your schedule is full of appointments with doctors, which invites us to think that there is a lot of somatization. They have appointments and more appointments. They have had traumatic experiences, and now they are emerging all their sufferings. Very few members of a refugee family have no health problems.
A .: And since there is no longer a healthy subject but an insufficiently studied one, these, as they have multiple annoyances and very strange things, are studied from head to toe and, in the end, of course, they find some type of insufficiency. Of course not! I am afraid that they feel sick, because it is one thing to have a disease and another to feel sick.
What have you learned from this process? What is it giving you?
A .: At the moment, it has reaffirmed our belief: trusting people usually works. On the other hand, personally, it hurt me to have an empty apartment, so that issue is solved. I think that for our son it is also important. And we have new friends …
M.J .: I don’t know if we have learned anything new, because we already have several experiences in this regard, but it hasn’t hurt us. And our son, for example, defends them, takes care that whatever happens, this family has a place to live. For Carlos, it is a way of learning to share, to be generous, to think of others.
Nerea Melgosa, director of Equality and Human Rights of the Provincial Council of Álava
(Basque Autonomous Region, Spain)
“Personal involvement is one of the keys to success”
The current director of Equality and Human Rights of the Diputación held, when we interviewed her in the spring of 2019, the position of councilor for Coexistence and Diversity, and Employment and Sustainable economic Development in the city of Vitoria-Gasteiz. It is inevitable that the municipal perspective is present above any other throughout the entire interview.
How did the conscious rental pilot project start?
It was a fluke, actually. Before the meeting that I held in June 2018 with María José Anitua and other ADCE organizers to prepare the conscious contracts congress in November of that same year, she had been meeting with the head of the Coexistence, Diversity and Social Affairs Service of the Vitoria-Gasteiz City Council, Estitxu Pereda, and we knew that there was a serious housing problem. The greatest demand for housing came from migrant people and refugee families. We saw that people were doing their itinerary of insertion and inclusion in society, because the reception was being very good, but that the integration was not real, because there was no housing. We knew that after having been working with these people, many of the permits could be “dropped” due to housing. So when the organizers of the congress came to explain to us what collaborative law and conscious contracts were, it occurred to us to propose applying it in the case of refugee families’ homes.
What is the housing policy of a city council?
Housing policy has two parts. On the one hand, we have people who do not want to rent their home due to fear and ignorance of the tenant of what their home is –which also has sentimental value–, and on the other, we have a sector of the population that wants to bring everyone together. migrants in the same neighborhood or building. It did not seem appropriate to us to apply this measure, we have never opted for this way of working. So when someone comes telling us that they feel capable, that they have another way of working –a conscious contract–, that they are capable of negotiating, of talking and of knowing each other… it seems to us a matter of common sense. In this case, they were talking about putting the owner of a house in contact with the refugee family… We, as a City Council, could not leave these people alone. They may have had sufficient legal knowledge of conscious contracts, etc., but it is equally true that the world of refugees was unfamiliar to them.
Is there anyone who is familiar with and working with refugees at the municipal level?
In Vitoria-Gasteiz, and in the Spanish State, there are three, mainly, the associations that deal with the issue of refugees through the European Union: Red Cross, Cear and Accem. We, as a City Council, work at the refugee table. We have been working on the issue for a few years, the situation of families, etc., although they are very few, sadly, because the contingent that is arriving here, and throughout the Spanish State, is being very scarce. We know the peculiarities of each of the associations, and how we can work with each of them. It seemed to us that the Arteale Foundation could work with Accem, a very easy NGO to work with and a very interesting journey. It was a matter of networking, of building that fabric or that web. The more consistent that web is, the better city we will make, because the base will be laid. I like people to get to know each other, to work with each other, weaving the web. One thing led to another, a commission led to a meeting, and we started weaving.
What do you think of the cultural and language barriers? They always come up …
When you start any pilot experience, you have to start with the easy. I was sure that Accem would choose a comfortable family to start working. We all wanted the experience to go well. We chose a family with a Spanish language and a culture similar to that of our. I found it incredible that María José Anitua offered her own apartment for the experience. Personal involvement is one of the keys to success. The emotional plays a lot… This is a personal commitment, a new and very pampered project, and it has to be that way. It is like a baby. Before leaving it to the community, you have to take care of it, see its defects and possible improvements, protocolize the process, until it is extended to the entire community. Go slowly, without exposing refugee families to one-day headlines. They are people with big backpacks on their backs, people we have to take care of. And, equally, we have to take care of the people who are putting their professionalism on the table, exposing their heritage and that of their family, and their own being. So step by step.
You have mentioned the Red Cross, Cear and Accem as the three associations that deal with migrants at the European Union level.
Every refugee family has an arrival process, accompanied by these associations. The family receives an economic amount, because the European Union pays for these families for a period of one year. After the year, the family can refer and go to another place; for making regrouping, for example. They are free to do so, but, on the other hand, they have already asked for their residence permits, and by the time they receive the permits, they lose their rights and the entire process that has been carried out with that family is invalidated. In the end, it is not worth anything, because they stay again as irregular migrants. It’s very hard. There are people who have invested in training courses, etc. And the case of sons and daughters is also very worrying. The first year, they request their papers, they are not granted them, which is why they request an extension of time. The following year, they may not be granted the papers, and may have to leave, or remain in an irregular situation. We are talking about refugees, migrants who enjoy more advantages, but there are many people who have jumped over the fences, and who are irregular. They don’t have a check or anything.
What role corresponds to the institutions?
Administrative procedures are from yesteryear. Public-private collaboration exists, but it doesn’t stop flowing. The administration is still very archaic, nineteenth-century and Jacobin. You have to take steps forward. But the three historical territories of the Autonomous Community act differently. I think that first are the ideas of the associations, and second, the actions of the institutions. It is dangerous for the institution to start with these issues, because the administration’s rhythms and procedures slow down the entire process. Furthermore, as María José Anitua usually says, it is a matter of people. It is much better for private initiative to go its way. Later, we will meet again. This does not mean that the institutions do not have to legislate, by means of ordinances or establishing protocols of action and social clauses, or working a certain formula to pave the way, but the initiative must be carried out by private entities.
According to different opinions, it is not necessary to legislate more, it would simply be necessary to apply and interpret the existing laws properly.
If it is not to legislate, it is to protocolize, to leave a mark, to mount wigs, because at the slightest political change, a project, however interesting it may be, can be cornered to a minimum. It is necessary to record the continuity of the project, so that, even if it is on the part of the opposition, it can be held accountable for it. Training is needed, sensitivity is needed, and it is necessary to be very vigilant, because our tendency is to return to the previous situation.
What future do you see for this new type of conscious contract?
It is a practice that is going to spread, but I think it is time for the administrations to make a pattern. The work of private entities is fine, but when it is necessary, the administration needs to intervene. When something is working, as a novelty and as a pilot experience, and it is proven that it is giving good results, I think the administration has to work. These projects for renting flats, guardianships, inclusion, etc. work with various associations. The Department of Housing of the city of Vitoria-Gasteiz, or the Department of Welfare of the Basque Government, are working on it… Housing is a problem, because it is a necessity. In the three Basque capitals there is very little housing for rent, and work is being done with different associations that have apartments, Caritas, for example. They have floors of the church, or from family donations, and they work on integrated projects of the person in matters of training, education, employment and housing, and they do it in collaboration with different administrations. Conscious contracts and the Arteale Foundation can go the same way
Home Owners
María del Coro Calle (Property sale)
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Arteale, as it has been a great satisfaction to collaborate with this Foundation and with the deeply human projects it has supported to help refugees who have no home in which to settle.
For this reason, after the passing of my father and with my mother’s consent, we decided to donate the temporary usufruct of the empty home in which they had lived until then to the Foundation. This donation proved to be of great help, as when I needed support to care for my mother, Arteale put me in contact with a wonderful Latin American woman who took on those caregiving responsibilities with great affection, care, and professionalism. In view of this and given her need for housing, Arteale decided to provide her with the home we had ceded under usufruct.
Subsequently, when I was hospitalized due to a heart condition and was unable to care for my mother, this woman once again took care of her. When the usufruct donation came to an end, I wished to sell the property. The housing need for this family continued, and with Arteale’s collaboration we proceeded to arrange an installment-based purchase and sale agreement. All the bureaucracy and paperwork that both parties had to complete was facilitated by the Foundation, without which it would have been impossible to carry out this transaction. The outcome has been highly beneficial both for the Latin American family and for myself.
Given the very positive experience I have lived through, and by way of conclusion, I would like to highlight the extremely important role that associations and foundations of this kind play in our society. Their sole purpose is to lend a helping hand to people without resources, and in my view, their contribution should be more widely recognized and supported, with greater assistance from official institutions.
María del Coro Calle.
Alberto and Maria José
(Home owners)
We are used to accompanying complicated processes. End-of-life processes, whether they last for hours, days, months… or years.
It was in this context that we met María José and her mother.
And it turned out that his path was not yet finished. That, setting aside what medicine had indicated for her medical diagnoses in an eagerness to fill any problem with drugs, a full life emerged, awake and capable of enjoying that, LIFE.
And, as I say, that is where we met María José.
And she spoke to us of other complicated processes, of other lives that were seeking to be LIFE.
And we perceived synergies, we felt them. How easy it is to communicate when you share your gaze. When you see the other person from their potential, their individuality, their BEING… When their difficulties, their problems (cognitive deficit, language difficulties, fragility…) are not what defines them. Much less what is definitive.
And we embarked. With all our precautions; the physical distance between our home and our flat, the shortage of time to devote, our elderly parents, our son growing up… All that was put on the back burner when we met them. That meeting… With a translator for words, but with infinite communication. Looks, gestures… It wasn’t a real estate operation. And it wasn’t an act of charity either. It was something else. It is something else.
With our problems of distance, time, child, parents… we attended new meetings where communication grew. And there were differences. And red lines. And rethinking. But with the respect that two families have for each other, weeks, months, years went by… and we continued with the project because we knew it was good for everyone. And Arteale continued to be there to guide us at all times, helping us in our shortcomings and supporting the process, looking at what was best for each family and making it possible for everything to go smoothly.
The process took on a rhythm and life of its own. Arteale maintained a presence that was most evident near the end, when a major crisis unexpectedly arose. I suppose it is not easy to understand a process when you come back to it. And it costs. And it was difficult when a person burst in and upset the balance achieved during all these months. They were moments of worry, of impotence… And once again, communication, presence, patience, quick reflexes, the search for alternatives… all these virtues that Arteale puts into all this made the crisis a time of growth. For everyone.
It would be an understatement to say that we are grateful. We have grown, we have lived, we are » different «. In practical terms; we have kept a flat without losing money and without major worries. And when it all started this was our goal. But this would be an almost absurd reduction. Now we have more friends and fewer prejudices. And that really is a rounded business.
Signed
Alberto and Maria José
Aunt Elena
(Home owner)
I am María José Anitua Trevijano’s aunt and have relied on her as a lawyer for various professional matters for many years.
Dear María José, you asked me how my experience with refugees has been. At first I thought about it a lot because I had never rented the flat. My nephews and nieces had lived there and I kept the house ready in case they needed it. After thinking about it, I said yes, because I was doing charity work. And I was getting some money, which I could also use for some repairs the neighbours wanted to do. But at the same time I was worried about getting it back if I needed it. I needed to have that security, as was reflected in the contract María José made with Arteale.
The relationship with the neighbours was very important to me and that is why the Arteale Foundation took care of talking to most of the neighbours, who did not object to the entry of an Algerian family in a small community and some of the neighbours are family.
In the contract it was written that if there were problems with the community, the refugee family should look for another location. The family had a two-month-old child born in our country and we had a very cordial relationship, but with a small child there were problems with the neighbour downstairs because the small child cried and woke up her granddaughter. And Arteale took care of managing this conflict in a positive way, without me having to do anything.
Then came the Covid-19 pandemic and the family started to have a hard time because they lost their jobs and the rent was reduced a lot, as well as other expenses such as heating, electricity, etc., which I passed on to them as soon as they told me. We have been very happy and I think they have received a big favour. The Arteale Foundation also lent them money.
Once the family left, a neighbour told me that he was glad they were leaving, but other neighbours told me that they had been very good to them.
María José thank you very much for everything and a big hug.
Your aunt
Signed
Aunt Elena
María del Coro Calle Alonso
(Home owner)
In all aspects of my life, I have always been very conscious that for me «trust» is paramount and for this to exist, we must first understand others without any prejudice if we want others to understand us as well.
And I mention this thought because trust has been the basis of my relationship and connection with María José from the first moment I started working for her, being in charge of the care of her two young children, until today, and it is also because of this thought that my family and I decided to collaborate with this wonderful project in which values such as empathy, understood as humanity, trust, calmness, respect for others and respect for the environment we are part of, are fundamental.
We began to collaborate in the project by giving usufruct for two years of the house in which my mother lived alone, a 93-year-old widow, and which had been empty for only 6 months after she broke her hip. We had the option of selling it in mind, but we ruled it out at first because of the work needed on the flat in which my parents, now very old, had lived all their lives.
Far from thinking that the donation and collaboration process would be complicated, due to the renovations and works that the house required and, in addition, the lack of time available due to the continuous care of my mother because of her limited mobility, the process could not have been simpler. Arteale explained it to us very well and provided us with all kinds of facilities: the notary came to our home to sign the transfer, and Arteale also took charge of the renovation work, which has been surprisingly efficient in a short period of time, the cost of which we thought was going to be four times more than what was invested, leaving a very dignified and accessible home.
«It is not just an economic transaction». I perfectly remember my mother’s words when we explained the project to her, we asked her for her opinion on the matter and after listening to them we had no hesitation in collaborating: «And why do I want an empty house? This way it is used, protected and helps other people to build a new life. We all benefit from it».
The first family was mistakenly given the keys prematurely without having finalised the conscious partnership agreement. Arteale quickly became aware of the manipulation of the tenants by continuing the concious agreement. Although problematic, Arteale dealt with the difficult situation and managed to get the family out of the flat after 10 months.
Several families have lived in the flat. Some have left by accessing normal market rental resources.
When María José raised the possibility of taking in a Ukrainian family without going through the process of conscious collaboration, as the owner I did not object, based on the trust I felt in the Arteale Foundation. In the end it was not possible due to the fear of the refugee woman with a daughter few months old, who was living in the house at the time, of sharing it with men.
At the moment there is a family of five whose mother takes care of my mother, the owner of the house, who has been bedridden for more than two years and with whom she has a better relationship than with the other carers.
I would definitely recommend this experience to others, in fact, we have renewed the usufruct for another two years, for all the support received from Arteale, for their follow up and attention, always being aware of what is convenient for the parties, for the integrity, honesty shown and for contributing to a good that benefits the whole society.
It is about going beyond managing a property, it is about helping to evolve as a society, to grow in harmony in order to achieve a balanced, inclusive and sustainable coexistence.
Signed
María del Coro Calle Alonso
Refugees
Testimony Refugee Family
First of all, we would like to thank the ARTE ALE Foundation for the support and closeness we have felt throughout the entire process.
We are a family composed of my wife and our two children, and we were the first family to participate in the pilot conscious renting project aimed at supporting immigrant families.
Our journey alongside the Arte Ale Foundation began in 2018 in a reception apartment. Due to our circumstances, we found ourselves having to move several times between different apartments intended for families in situations similar to ours. Despite the difficulties that moving always entails, we consistently had the support of the Foundation.
Throughout this entire process, we have always felt supported and have maintained close contact with the president of the Foundation, María José Anitua, whether through meetings, shared meals, or other moments.
Based on this relationship, during a meeting to discuss our current situation, María José asked whether we had ever considered the possibility of applying for a mortgage. At that time, it seemed difficult due to my wife’s part-time job. However, knowing that we would have the Foundation’s guidance and support, my wife began looking for another job. She was then offered a better position with improved salary conditions. We informed María José of this new situation and, after giving it some thought, we felt encouraged to begin searching for a home.
The Foundation advised us on where to look and what aspects we should consider before entering into negotiations. During the search, several options were ruled out due to negative indicators.
After several months of searching, we found a property that we liked after visiting it. The Foundation then contacted the real estate agency, and negotiations for the property began. We were informed that the Arte Ale Foundation would grant us a credit line of €20,000 to help finance the purchase.
They also provided us with legal advice, as we were unfamiliar with this type of process, including the drafting of the deposit contract, the private purchase agreement, and the public deed. They also informed us about the consequences of purchasing a property with potential hidden defects. In fact, during a second visit to the property—after the deposit contract had already been signed—we discovered dampness hidden behind some wardrobes. The Foundation advised us that this issue would be mentioned in the public deed so that the seller would later assume the costs of repairing the damage. This was not easy, as the seller was initially unwilling to take responsibility.
Additionally, the Foundation helped us manage the donation of furniture and household items that we did not have or that were in poor condition in the property. They also assisted us in coordinating with a company to repair the damp wall at an affordable price.
For all this and much more, we would like to thank the Arte Ale Foundation for all the support our family has received. We wish them great success in their new projects, helping more families like ours who need support, whether for renting or purchasing a home.
Kind regards.
Thank you very much.
Testimony of the first Ukrainian refugees hosted
I would like to express my gratitude to Mrs. Maria José. My son and I received a roof over our heads and support. The team of the Arteale association took care of us at every step and in every need. We are very ashamed of the way we have been treated, even in the smallest way.
ALL OF THIS IS UNEXPECTED AND VERY HARD TO BELIEVE BUT THANK GOD IT IS REAL.
After the welcome received and in gratitude, they decided to collaborate with the Arteale Foundation by assembling a bunk bed for the reception flat.
Second Ukrainian refugee family hosted
Thank you, Maria Jose and Arteale, for this house that we have felt like ours. We are truly thankful.
Maria Jose Anitua
(promoter of EHC)
They said that they were so grateful that they were ashamed. After thinking about it, this comment made us ask for their testimonies and their support in assembling the bunk bed that we have bought for the ocassion.
Ukrainian translator
As a translator, it is the first time that I see anything like this, when they come here, they get a place to stay and all the suppport they need. Honestly, I reaffirm my gratitude for the solidarity shown with the Ukrainian people.
CCA Collaborators
Testimonial Pablo Piñeiro
For me, the Conscious Collaborative Accords has been much more than simply signing an agreement between both parties. It has been a process of self-discovery, as well as a reflection on what I expect from myself and from others.
As it is both a legal and, to some extent, a holistic process, I have felt throughout that I am a fundamental part of the agreement. This is not about “committing to legal and collaborative terms”; it is about understanding each person’s strengths and weaknesses, and using that awareness to move together in the same direction, with the goal of achieving a shared and positive outcome for all parties involved.
Testimonial Javier
Testimonial Ricardo Romo
David Parejo
The Conscious Collaborative Accords have been a great discovery and an amazing process to experience work/life balance.
The whole process was and still is a reconnection journey to get to know María José and her project on a true co-creative adventure.
I love the holistic approach integrating solid tools like the TKI together with flexible principles and methodologies such as Agile Lean, Appreciative Inquiry and Design Thinking. I want to be honest and remark that I was a bit reluctant in the beginning and I did not pay the attention that TKI questionnaires deserve. As the process went on, I understood the importance and the information that they can show to overcome archetypes and the challenges that they bring to the table. They are 'key' elements and a very important piece of the whole puzzle.
I really enjoyed the game of values and the personal interactions with María José helping to be aligned as well as shaping our own connection. It was amazing to feel we have similar dreams and the power of the collective to achieve common goals and results, making true that 'We are not alone!'
During my career in the corporate world in executive positions and as a company owner and entrepreneur, I've always valued the power of relationships to nurture healthy and long term partnerships. At some point, we sort of lost view of that essence and focused a little bit too much on the goal and the power and control dynamics. We forgot about the human factor and our humanness.
I have been seeking for so long to reconnect with that original purpose and I am deeply grateful to have found María José who is a living example and has spent most of her life with a collaborative mindset and has been a great catalyst to bring the Conscious Collaborative Accords as powerful tools to facilitate the transition from the old obsolete competitive-like model into a collaborative connections fostering a more natural and regenerative way of living.
I am happy to be part of this amazing journey on a 'Thinking Big' and 'Deep' project like this. Deep Feeling of Gratitude, 'DFoG' .
Iñigo Benedicto
(CCA Collaborator)
We wanted to renew our company’s partnership pact and the process has been tremendously inspiring. It has led to a calm, honest and empathetic conversation that has allowed us, after so many years, to understand each other better in good times and bad and to bond even more. We use the values game with our new hires and it has just helped us make bold strategic decisions with surprising fluidity.
Santiago Barrueco
(CCA Collaborator)
A fantastic tool that allows you to know yourself and be known for real.
Glenn Meier
(CCA Collaborator)
The CCA process is an easy and fun way to develop relationships with others quickly. By going through the CCA process when I first collaborated with EHC, I quickly integrated with the team. They understood important things about me, and I knew important things about them. Throughout our collaboration, we referred back to things that came up in our CCA. It is an amazing tool for collaborative relationships!
Maria Cuba
(CCA Collaborator)
There are times in our lives when we are lucky enough to be presented with an opportunity to be part of something transformative, powerful and in service of the greater good. A few months ago I was presented with such an opportunity when I met Maria Jose and the Empty Homes Collaborative Project. I have always been concerned with the challenges that people face, particularly disenfranchised individuals and families, when it comes to finding a secure and dignified home. As
someone who grew up without the privilege of homeownership, I know too well the feeling of insecurity and fear that comes from living in places that always feel temporary and with no sense of belonging. This is why when I learned about EHC I didn't only feel compelled to learn more, I knew I wanted to be part of it. However, homelessness is often viewed as a numbers problem, and when it comes to solutions we are often met with a pragmatic approach that while it may be rooted in results it is also stripped of a humane perspective. The fact that EHC has seen beyond that and has created a human first approach with their Collaborative and Conscious agreements is what sets it apart and what brings much needed empathy, dignity and compassion to the process. I was amazed at how each step of the agreements brought a powerful new way to understand and view the process and the solutions and changes that we aim to create. Not only did I learn about EHC, the people and families they aim to serve and the complexity of the issues, but I also learned about my place in this journey, the opportunity to contribute and the feelings
and beliefs that it nurtured. Maria Jose and her EHC team are doing work that is fundamental to finding new paths and sustainable solutions for addressing the homelessness problem, but in turn they are also ontributing to better societies, a healthy environment, reducing climate impact, and building collaborative communities. This is how we will achieve solutions, with innovation, open minds, but most of all, TOGETHER!
Public-Private Collaboration
Iñaki Zabala
(Euskal Air)
Although I was surprised by María José Anitua’s request, given the time that has elapsed in relation to her professional work as a legal advisor to Euskal Air (1991 / 1992), I am pleased to be able to help her, given the justification for her request: the new challenge of public-private collaboration in the reuse of empty houses.
I was managing director when she joined the airline Euskal Air S.A., which operated under the trade name of Nort Jet. The company was founded at the beginning of 1989 at the instigation of the Provincial Council of Alava and the Chamber of Commerce of Alava, to operate regular flights from Vitoria Airport.
The capital was mainly Basque. Most of it belonged to three banks in this region. On 14 April 1992 it ceased operations after three years. The closure was due to the Basque government’s failure to provide the capital that was available and to the fact that the aircraft were not as profitable as expected. This experience was an important learning experience.
In the negotiations with the Basque Government, María José Anitua played an important role, holding several meetings with the then Deputy Minister of the Basque Government, Fernando Buesa, with whom she had previously worked. Although the negotiations did not produce the desired results, I would like to highlight María José’s perseverance, honesty, involvement and positive attitude in the search for viable solutions.
She worked as a team with me and the company’s CEO, Lázaro Ros, in a situation of extreme financial difficulty. A climate of deep trust was generated, to the point of offering her to become a part-owner, in order to avoid bankruptcy.
This trust has continued in other professional assignments in which her help and negotiating skills have been successfully concluded.
I recommend María José for her professional career and excellent management in this area of public-private collaboration, despite not achieving the desired objectives in the case of Euskal Air.
Ramón Bernal Uribarrena
(Funko)
Dear Sir/Madam
We hereby wish to acknowledge the experience that our organisation, FUNKO, Confederation of Foundations of the Basque Country, has had with María José Anitua, during the time she served as the organisation’s Technical Secretary.
FUNKO, as representative of the foundation sector in the Basque Country, maintains an active collaboration with the Basque Government department that regulates the Protectorate of Foundations. It is a relevant interlocutor, developing a continuous public-private collaboration, which facilitates offering a better context for organisations to develop their social aims.
In this task, during 2016, Maria José Anitua collaborated with FUNKO in the revision of the draft of the new Foundations Law that was to be approved in the Basque Country. Different articles were identified that, with the definition they had in the draft, could cause problems in the management and an intense work was done to put forward proposals to solve the problems indicated.
After active negotiation, in which Maria José Anitua played an important role, an agreement was reached on the new wording of the draft amendment to the Law, proving the good result of the management carried out.
All of this recognises the appropriate management carried out in this area of public-private collaboration between FUNKO and the Basque Government’s Protectorate of Foundations, in which Maria José Anitua played an important role.
Signed
Ramón Bernal Uribarrena
Currently FUNKO Board Member, President for the years 2016 to 2021.
Jesús Alfredo Ispizua Zuazua
(Basque Government)
Jesús Alfredo Ispizua Zuazua, professionally a civil servant of the Basque Government, currently holding the post of head of legal advice in the Directorate of Social Economy (Department of Labour and Employment), states, at the request of the interested party and for the purposes invoked by her, that he has known María José Anitua professionally during the performance of her duties as head of the legal advice area of the Directorate of Administrative Registers and Local Regime of the Department responsible for foundations (then Department of the Interior, Justice and Public Administration).
In this regard, it should be borne in mind that the Spanish constitution recognises the right of foundation for purposes of general interest, in accordance with the law, article 34.1. In the case of the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country (ACBC) it is currently, Law 9/2016, of 2 June, on Foundations of the Basque Country, article 1 of which defines the foundation as a private asset, permanently affected to the realisation of purposes of general interest.
The ACBC is responsible, among other functions, for the registration of those foundations to which it is applicable.
Amongst the acts subject to registration, the act of constitution is of special legal relevance. The formalisation of the constitutive act, its organic and functional design, as well as the specification of the activities to be carried out and the economic regime to which it is subject, – independently of the important tax effects derived from it – is usually complex for people who are willing to allocate private assets to general interest purposes; all the more so when multiple founders concur in the articulation of the same general interest. For this reason, the work of legal advisors is decisive for its legal formalisation.
In this sense, María José Anitua, in a specific case of particular complexity, and as a representative and legal advisor of private interests, has carried out an excellent professional activity, in my opinion, with singular professional expertise, bringing about its alignment and conjunction with the general interest, for its formal legal configuration as a foundation in accordance with the autonomous foundational regulations in force at the time.
Signed
Jesús Alfredo Ispizua Zuazua
Interviews by Miel A. Elustondo for EHC Book
Interview by Miel A. Elustondo to Refugee family 1
Refugee family awaiting asylum in collaborative rental agreement.
“Things that we never thought in our lives would happen, have happened to us”.
It is difficult to understand the situation of refugee families who already live among us, who share our lives, concerns and the comings and goings of the society we share. In the case of the family that has received us in their home in Vitoria-Gasteiz. They arrived in our city in March 2019 fleeing from fear, and even here, they must maintain their anonymity out of fear….
Miel A. Elustondo – zaldi ero
You started talking about fear…
He: Where we come from there are many things that are unbelievable, literally unbelievable. We ourselves were terrified. When we arrived here, half a year ago, I had the habit of looking from one side to the other, fearing that someone would attack us. My family was already telling me: “Don’t worry, we are not there anymore! Most of all, our eldest son: “Dad, stop! stop!”. There is that fear.
She: And even more now, with social networks, everything expands in a second. It’s not like before, when it was very difficult for information to reach other places. Now it is no longer like that. We’ve seen too many cases.
He: These criminals have so much money, so many arms, so many tentacles! So much that, in our country, they have infiltrated people in Interpol to have knowledge and know where generals and people of that rank are! If they can even do that, what can happen to you!
She: Corruption is there. You file a claim, and the police themselves pass on information to them, to the criminals.
Why did you leave your country?
He: For fear that they would kill us, that they would kill my wife and children. [He points to a news item on his computer and reads us two headlines. The first one reads: “Arrested a violent hitman leader who traveled to Spain to expand in Europe”; the second one: “Capture of Interpol agent exposes corruption of the Urabeños in Colombia”]. In our country there is something called the bacrim, which are criminal gangs. In the big cities there are criminal gangs that operate as if they were a network, they are connected. They are taken as the biggest cartel in South America. In the neighborhoods they do what they call drug micro-trafficking, and they also charge vaccines.
Vaccines?
He: If you have a business, or a good quality of life, they find out. They come to you, knock on your door, and say, “You, from now on, are going to help us”. They say they are going to protect you. That is like their saying, because what are they going to protect us from, if not from themselves?
She: “I am going to protect you, but if you don’t pay me in money, you pay me with the life of one of your relatives”. That is what they want to say.
He: It happened that they came to me and told me that. An example: you earn a hundred euros, so you plan your life to live on those hundred euros. When someone comes and tells you that you have to give him fifteen of those hundred euros, your finances become unbalanced, because you have bills to pay, for example. In fact, I had started a business, which was going well, because we worked hard on it, but that does not mean that you had millions, because that is not so, because I owed money to the banks. But the thing is that the business was growing, and then, these people came to charge me. Little by little, finances began to tighten, and that’s what they always told me, that if I didn’t pay them, they would charge me with my family’s blood. When I saw that situation, I thought I had to look for an alternative. And my alternative was not to go to the police, because we saw that they talked to the police. The police have them vaccinated, they charge them taxes.
She: The police know that this network exists, but to let them work, the gangs pay the police.
Him: So I began to see that the situation had no future. I started to think about what to do. Go to another city? It’s the same thing, because the bacrim are connected! As I strangled myself economically, I had to get out of everything: I had to sell the business, the car… I asked for credit in the banks, and with that money we left. I could ask the banks for credit to pay the gangs, but there will come a time when I will not be able to pay back the money to the banks, nor will they lend me more, and then the gangs will come to execute me. There is no other way. It had already happened where we lived. What happens is that you never think it will happen to you. The owner of the butcher’s shop, they killed him.
She: And the one at the funeral home was attacked. Like the story of “it got dark, and the Lord did not dawn”.
He: We brought our children with us, supposedly on vacation… I have to say that I didn’t even tell my wife about these things, but she noticed.
She: Yes, I said that something was going on because he was strange. I asked him: “What’s going on with the money, why are you selling everything?
Him: I never told them anything because I didn’t want to fill them with fear. And at work I never said anything to anyone, because you don’t know who knows who. And, besides, who is going to be next to a person who at any moment, if he doesn’t pay, they are going to kill him. Even the ladies who have arepas shops have to pay!
She: For example, my son always asked for a trip to Paris, as a quinceañero [Quinceañero, a “coming of age” that is celebrated with great jubilation in different Latin American countries]. That trip was planned a long time before. We tried to stick to the plan. The children were not told anything. We arrived in Barcelona, and four days later, we had to talk to them. And that’s when our daughter went into depression.
He: After Barcelona, we spent about four months in Paris, and later we came to Vitoria, through a friend of my wife.
She: We had to find a way out, we had to survive any way we could. I told my husband that I was going to talk to a friend I knew was here, in Vitoria. It had been many years since I had spoken to her, I told her we were going to Valencia. She thought we were on vacation. She told us to stay with her for a few days and then we would go on to Valencia, because they said that there were many more people from all over, that we could sell empanadas, as we did in Paris… And we liked it here very much, we thought it was very nice… I started to talk to my husband, that we had to ask for help, but we were afraid. In fact, initially, my husband went to the police by himself. Then we all went, because they told him he had to bring his whole family. So, we all went and the whole process started here. It had been a week from the time we arrived until we went to the police.
At some point you contacted Arteale and Arcem?
She: We started looking for an apartment here, in real estate agencies or on the street. But we don’t have any documents other than our passports. And they told us no. My friend said to rent an apartment in her name, but you don’t want to cause problems for people. So, I thought of telling the whole truth to a real estate lady. Her name is Inés, an angel sent by God. I told her everything that was happening, she told me to come the next day at such and such hour, that she was going to talk to a friend, a property owner, to see if she could help us. She said she was a very busy person, but let’s see! He gave us an address, we went and that’s how we met María José [Anitua], from Arteale, who provided us with the apartment. Through Arteale, we contacted Arcem. But they told us that if they helped us one hundred percent, it turned out that we could be left without Arteale’s apartment, that they could send us to other cities, where they could place us… It was like starting again from scratch. And we, after having been super-displaced, super-stressed… and already having an apartment… we said no. Having an apartment was for us like living again. Not to start again. For our daughter, the change here [Europe] was horrible. Once in Vitoria, she started to feel better. She draws very beautifully. When we were in Paris, her drawings reflected sadness. When we arrived here, her drawings changed.
You signed a collaborative rental contract with Arteale. How was that process?
He: We are immersed in that process. For us it is something new. Arteale, as its name says, is art, and that’s why we have to express our idea of the contract in a drawing. We have to be very natural. It’s not a normal type of contract, you pay a fee and that’s it. We are used to that. But in this case, it’s not like that.
She: We thought it was a nice thing that we could contribute with our drawings, with our vision. We are used to being very independent, and the fact that our children could contribute their vision with their drawings, that they could be part of the project, seemed very nice to us. Then it became difficult for us, because it is like putting an idea on paper, and that is difficult. But we have been learning how to do it. DRAWINGS The vision, the mission, the touchstone, the red lines?
He: There it is defining what you can and can’t do. We have liked that from the very first moment, making things clear. It’s very good for me to mark how far you can go. What has made the process more difficult for us is that we forgot the appointments, the meetings. They may think that we are making ourselves look bad because we want to, but that is not the case. For us it is very important to do things well and we are incredibly grateful to Arteale, because Arteale opened its doors to us as soon as we arrived. Arteale helps us with housing, and is a bridge for everything else. At no time has it ever crossed our minds to be in bad taste with them, with Arteale. That’s what made the whole process more difficult for us. She: We are so stressed, so stressed, that when we had to go to the police to make the request and everything, we left our passports at home.
He: We have all the documents super organized, both originals and copies, passports and health cards… Everything. And that day we were going to the police we left our papers at home! We are correct people, accomplished, but we have looked bad in front of Arteale more than once, for getting our appointments wrong. The last time it happened, I sat on the couch half in despair, trying to understand what was happening to us: “Why is this happening to us over and over again if we supposedly have things under control?” I started to do a self-examination, trying to visualize the situation. During the day I have nothing else to do but go to study. Unconsciously, my brain is always thinking about the future, the past, the current condition… it’s always on. I have in there what the lawyer told us, that many refugee families have been denied their asylum request. Everything is uncertain… Our son is not studying. Me, I keep my mind busy, because otherwise I’m always thinking: “What if…? And what if…”. It is enough to be denied the papers to be blocked, because you become marginalized, because you become undocumented and you no longer have the option to offer your children a university, a future, nor to offer them my help, my same potential…. Everything remains there, with no road to travel. At the moment all we do is, after applying for asylum papers at the police, wait six months until they give it to us or not. I hope it all comes together, because in six months I am finishing my studies here. And what if it doesn’t? All that keeps me in a labyrinth, with my mind very congested, trying to visualize the future and some emergency exit… What would happen if we were not granted asylum? What would happen to Arteale’s project? Because we are a project… We live in fear of going through again what we went through before coming here. We don’t have any stability, we are very stressed. Her: The only good thing we have is that we have an apartment, a house. When we walked into this house we couldn’t believe it. When Arteale put the keys on the table for us, I couldn’t believe it. “Is this happening?” Because it’s one thing to tell it and another thing to live it. One has one’s comforts, one’s house, one’s life… Arriving in Paris was sleeping in a kitchen, in a living room… Then at my friend’s house. She had a dog in a room and she had it fitted out for us… I thank her in my soul, but arriving here was…
He: Getting into this house was a lottery, literally! Things that we never, ever, ever in our lives thought would happen, have happened to us. From one moment to the next, life gives you a 180-degree turn that you are left, literally, in hinopia. Like that, literally. Because we didn’t even have a bed, we had a mat on the floor [floor].
Her: The friend I’m talking about does nails, at her house, and she was there with her friends at nine, ten, eleven o’clock at night. And until they left, one could not go to bed, because it was the room where she worked, and where we went to bed.
He: Or he would tell us: “Tomorrow someone is coming, she is coming very early, you have to pick up the room very early”… I feel that we are like provisional, waiting for the resolution of the police, waiting, to ask for the work permit later. That’s when I will feel like I can step on the ground. That we can work and depend on ourselves.
Interview by Miel A. Elustondo to Refugee family 2
Anonymous testimony
Hope and illusion, the journey of a refugee family.
They arrived in Vitoria-Gasteiz in July 2018. They openly state that in their country they had many problems, “because of terrorism”. He was a policeman, he had been working as such for seven years, and in the area he was responsible for monitoring and patrolling, cases of terrorism were happening. They decided to leave their country.
Miel A. Elustondo – zaldi ero
He was receiving death threats, urging him to quit his job as a policeman. He says it was nothing personal, that there was no other reason to threaten him, other than his job. “It was the case for many of my colleagues. My wife and I decided we couldn’t go on like this, so we applied for a visa to leave the country as tourists.” A permit that, in reality, is only valid for a fortnight or a month.
The couple in question flew from their country to Madrid. She was two months pregnant. After landing in Madrid, they went to Bilbao “because we had heard that people were treated well in the Basque Country. We had no friends or acquaintances, but in our minds, we had the idea of applying for asylum. That was clear to us. We left our country with that idea”. In Bilbao, they went to the CEAR office, where they presented their case and their intention to apply for asylum. “We told them our story, and they told us about their asylum program – aid, housing, etc. – from the beginning of our application until we received the response from Madrid. We did it all without anyone accompanying us. Until we contacted CEAR we had no help of any kind. We made that journey alone, my wife and I, always alone. And we didn’t know a word of Spanish either. We didn’t know how to say anything other than ‘Hello,’ thank goodness they had translators at CEAR,” he says. However, in addition to their mother language, they know how to speak both French and English.
Following CEAR’s program, they stayed for two months in a hotel in Derio (Bizkaia). They say they did nothing: “Eating, sleeping, sitting, walking and, above all, waiting, nothing but waiting until they got an answer to officially enter CEAR’s foster care program. In that same hotel there were people who had been waiting for six or seven months for an answer. We met, for example, a girl from Georgia who had been waiting for a year and two months for an answer. In the end they received it, and we know that they are now in A Coruña. We keep in touch with them. In the case of our protagonists, it didn’t take so long to receive the answer to their application. “We received it after two and a half months. They told us that they would send us to Vitoria-Gasteiz, where we would live in an apartment, within the CEAR program, although we would share the housing. They bought our bus ticket in Bilbao and sent us here. Accem people were waiting for us at the bus station and took us to an apartment. There was an empty room there that we occupied, and that’s where the host program really began. It was October 9, 2018,” they note, in closing. They shared an apartment with different people: a couple from Ukraine, a girl from Colombia and another one also from Ukraine. According to the first phase of the reception program, they had to reside for six months in that first house in Vitoria-Gasteiz and then receive the relevant aid, always managed by Accem: “Apart from other aid, they provided us with housing and helped us financially, for six months, with 50 euros per month for each adult member of the family. In that six-month period we had to find housing for our family, counting that we would receive an allowance of 560 euros to pay the rent and another 560 euros to subsist, to buy food and everything else: a total of 1,150 euros for everything”. And that is how they faced the arduous task of renting housing, without achieving their goal. “Renting housing is very difficult. People don’t want to rent their housing to any foreigners, or people with small children…. On the other hand, rents are expensive. They can cost 600 or 700 euros, so we could not find any apartment, and Accem extended the first phase, one month after the other, four months more, until we found the apartment we occupy now, the one in Arteale, through Accem. An apartment in the heart of the city, on San Antonio Street. And they tell us first-hand about their conscious rental experience. “The first time we met, the lawyer from Accem and María José [Anitua], from Arteale, participated in addition to us. That day, we talked about various topics in general. After that, we began to meet once a week and, later, once a fortnight. The aim was none other than to get to know each other, build trust, work on our values, establish limits or red lines…. We began by explaining how we had tried to find a rental property. We had a list of the real estate agencies we had visited, and another one of the rental apartments advertised on the Internet. All the landlords asked for a paycheck, a bank guarantee -sometimes-, and things that were impossible for us”. After holding some joint sessions, each of our characters had individual meetings with María José Anitua. “Yes, and so we kept talking about the values, about how we were going to manage the situation in case there were problems with the neighbors, about this and that… For a month and twenty days we talked about everything, in three-hour meetings. The meetings were perfect for building trust between Arteale and us. In reality, there was no difficulty other than the language, because we did not master it.” In the case of the woman, she did not start studying Spanish until September 2019, because of her pregnancy and subsequent motherhood.
They served their allotted period living in the Accem apartment until another family occupied it. Faced with the situation, Arteale somewhat accelerated the conscious rental process. “In the end we were conceded the apartment and we ‘premiered’ it on July 4, 2019, Thursday. We remember it well because it was all one: finish the Accem contract, pick up the things and come in here, to sleep… And it was great, it was really great. When they told us we were going to move into this house, it was phenomenal. After nine months of living in a room, and with a newborn son, it was very good for us. It is a very good apartment, in the heart of the city. It’s almost a dream to get this apartment, and at this price!”. Both are very grateful to Arteale. In any case, before moving into the apartment they currently occupy, they made their presentation to the community. To do so, they held a neighbors’ meeting. “We talked with them, in case problems arose, because in this community everyone is from Vitoria-Gasteiz, a foreigner has never lived there. It went very well. And so far we haven’t had any problems. We have been here since July [the interview was done in December 2019] and I still don’t know the neighbor. They say she is an old lady, but we don’t know her.”
No to the asylum application
Since they arrived in Vitoria-Gasteiz in October 2018, they immediately started studying Spanish in Accem courses. Then, he completed different courses both theoretical and practical, and started working in a warehouse in Jundiz. “The first six months we didn’t have a work permit, just the red card. On June 7, 2019, I was given the work permit, just when I was doing an internship in a company in Jundiz. I finished the contract, received the work permit – temporary, to be renewed every six months – and started working: things came one after the other.” As far as she was concerned, she did a practical course in a bakery, and was about to start working in the same place. And just when they had housing and work, they received a call from Accem: they were going to deny them the right to asylum they were requesting. Back to the beginning. “If they deny us asylum, they take away everything: the work permit, the red card… everything! We will be left with nothing, and out of the asylum program. Arteale has already told us that, even if we run out of help, he will help us pay the rent for housing and also provide us with help to eat.” But this is not the solution they are pursuing. “We don’t want to depend on help from anyone, the city council or whoever. It doesn’t make sense that two people who have been working, have to resort to aids because they have been denied permission. This situation doesn’t make us feel good. He has been working for more than six months and maintains good relations with his colleagues. And she is also excited, ready to start working. “And, now, they tell us that they are going to deny us asylum, that they are going to take everything from us… and they don’t explain why. All we have to do is wait. Wait and wait… As soon as we receive the notification, we will have to stop working. We have already been told that Arteale will help us to manage the help from the city council, and if that help is not enough, Arteale is planning another way to help us. We will have a loan to help us get by until we obtain residency. We’ve been here a year and a half now, and the law requires a three-year stay to get residency. Then we can go back to work with a contract. That’s their plan, that’s their hope.
Interview by Miel A. Elustondo to Alberto Melendez and M. J Almaraz. Owners of Empty Home in EHC project.
Alberto Meléndez and María José Almaraz
“Our son takes care that, whatever happens,
this family has a place to live ”
Alberto and María José are owners of one of the apartments that a refugee family from Afghanistan occupies for rent. They had an empty house that they kept so they could have it in case of need. They did not imagine that this apartment was indeed going to help cover needs, but not their own, but that of an Afghan family.
How does your participation in this project begin?
Alberto: We had an apartment that we occasionally gave to various people, and it was occupied for some periods of time, temporarily and temporarily. But we had no intention of doing business with him. We wanted to keep him, just in case, in case our son [Carlos] or his in-laws needed him. On the other hand, it seemed absurd to have it empty. So, one day, talking to María José [Anitua], she told us about this project of conscious contracts. It was all very natural. It seemed to us a simple process, in which, in addition, we could include our possible floor needs. Impossible easier! We were already told that the rental price was going to be below the market price, but we also did not have an urgent need for money. We were excited that the house was used by people who really needed it, so everything fit together very well.
María José: María José [Anitua] made it very easy for us. We did not have another project for that house, and it seemed nice to help others, while they helped us. It was reciprocal. And we already knew the difficulties that refugees go through.
A.: We sensed that they were not having a good time, but we did not really know their difficulties. We never even imagined them. In this sense, this relationship has involved a knowledge of its reality. On the other hand, many of our family performances are based on trust, and that also helped us to participate in the project that María José [Anitua] presented to us.
Tell us a little about trust. What does it mean? What does it mean to you? …
A.: Due to our work, throughout the week we interact with many people and that makes us learn to know people, without judging them, but knowing them. And María José [Anitua] inspired a lot of confidence in us. She herself is the initiator of the project, the first owner to offer her apartment for rent to refugee families. That says a lot in your favor. And I even remember a day when he called us very early in the morning saying that we were aborting the [rental] operation, that we were not going ahead, that the family we had assigned had problems to solve before we could rent our home. I want to say that María José [Anitua] pampers us, takes care of us, and that is a guarantee.
And how do you remember the first encounter with the refugee family?
A.: We live outside of Vitoria-Gasteiz, in a town, so we are not very to come and go to meetings and commitments there. But the first day we met the refugee family, it was spectacular, because it meant the fall of many prejudices. And a feeling of normality …!
M.J .: Naturally, I would say. After all, it is a family like ours, a family. Although I remember that that first day we communicated with the help of a translator. Now it is different, because they communicate in Spanish, and the two children they have here do well in Spanish.
A.: There were two key people in facilitating this communication: two Accem workers, one lawyer and the other social worker.
M.J .: They made us that first bridge, they brought us closer to the family.
A.: I remember it with voices. I don’t remember the translator communicating anything to me. I remember that I was communicating with them. It was spectacular. They were very grateful, and I was a little worried that they were so grateful, considering that they were solving a problem for us, that of the empty house. Saying thank you so many times doesn’t seem fair, but they already see all the possibilities that open up for them with a flat. Otherwise it would be terrible. I also have very much in mind the pain with which they speak of their country, of what is happening in Afghanistan … The house they occupy now is close to the train tracks, and our concern was that the noise of the train bothered them, but they they said it clearly, what they heard at home, in their country, was the noise of the bombs. “The noise of the train is music,” they translated for us.
Do things from their country count? “The noise of the bombs”, you said …
A .: We have to be very respectful of them. We cannot take photos of them, for example, nor do we harass them with questions about the situation in Afghanistan. There is much suffering in his eyes. And, for example, their children have not been schooled and have been confined at home for fear of the Taliban. The two children who are here with them, arrived here at 14 and 16 years old, and they had never attended school there! Get here, and in ten months they are on the course that corresponds to them, and one of them, the eldest, taking marks!
M.J .: We have been told that in Afghanistan they did not send their children to school because the Taliban showed up there and took both boys and girls. They also told us that music is prohibited …
A .: They are normal people, people who could be born in Vitoria-Gasteiz, people who had their profession, their way of life, and who, nevertheless, had to flee their country because their lives were in danger.
M.J .: They have two more children, older, who left Afghanistan three or four years before the rest of the family, and have lived those years without news of them. When the family finally came here and managed to contact the two elders, they lifted a huge weight off their shoulders.
A .: When we asked them how many children they had from the beginning, they did not answer clearly. Now it is something else, now they openly comment on it. They have two with them here, and two others, older, who left Afghanistan before them and are in Europe. In that sense, our communication has been normalized.
What do you think of the way to formalize the conscious contract? And the contract itself?
A .: This contract you understand, it is not the typical contract with clauses and annexes and a lot of small print that you can never read. In this case, the conscious contract is not a normal contract, it is elaborated together, each one indicates their values, their vision, the red lines, the economic agreement … and at what time, how and with whom should we speak in the case if a problem arises. It is still paper, a simple thing, but Arteale makes us read it, drawings included.
M.J. Anitua: They told us that it was possible that problems would arise, due to this type of contract, when requesting the register, the deposit of the deposit, etc. and we formalized a written contract, but both the padrón office and the Basque Government accepted it without problems, so we will continue to use the contract in comic format.
M.J .: I think that for them it is much better that way, because the problem was the language. The graphic expression is understood by all of us.
A .: They were very obvious things. We had the feeling that we were explaining red lines, but convinced that we will already make those red lines not appear, that we will already look for solutions. Our situation is one of power, and, in any case, it does not seem appropriate to me to be very strict with these refugee families, in need of housing and who are going to show themselves willing to sign whatever it takes to have a house to live. When there is agreement and a willingness to understand each other it is easier. What would have happened if this family did not accept our red lines? Maybe we would not have followed the contract either …
M.J. Anitua: The process of this conscious contract helps build trust. Without that trust, putting nothing but legality ahead, the deal may not have been possible. The fact that the two parties know each other is also very important, because it helps to build trust.
A .: It is true, because when we met them, everything changed. In case of need, I see myself looking for a flat to meet our needs, before going around bothering this refugee family to leave our home, as stated in the contract.
How have you worked on the values, the vision, the mission, the touchstone …?
A .: In our case, we did not have much time, so Arteale bridged the gap between the refugee family and us, although our needs and red lines appear in the contract.
M.J .: We point out some very simple things: respect for the neighbors, be careful with the music, animals not …
M.J. Anitua: Among the red lines, for example, it was included that in the event that the owners needed to dispose of the apartment, taking into account that María José’s parents are older and the case may be, the family that occupies that apartment I would agree to leave it. Accem did not welcome this point, did not want the refugee family to accept it, because legality does not contemplate it. However, the refugee family, as soon as they understood that the case of need would come from María José’s older parents, understood it. Also, it is not that they have to leave the apartment and stay on the street. No. But they may have to move up to three times from home, until they find the right one for their needs, because it is not easy to accommodate a family of four in a Vitoria-Gasteiz where the rent is skyrocketing.
M.J .: It is hard for me to understand so much gratitude. It is true that, on the one hand, it corresponds to us, we have the right to it, but it is like when we reviewed the contract. Over and over reviewing the contract! “Okay, we are crushing them!” I said. “We are crushing them.” It was excessive. And, furthermore, what Alberto says is true, that we have certain power, because we have no need to rent the house, and, on the other hand, they do.
A .: We think that this appreciation will be normalized, without further ado. I remember that soon after settling in the flat, I went there for something, and asked them how they were. “All right, all right … No hot water,” they told me. “What do you mean ‘not hot water’?” They had been without water for a week, simply because they hadn’t hit the boiler switch! Seven days without hot water, and they didn’t even call us! It coincided that I went, if not, they would continue saying “All good, all good!”, Although in reality not everything went well.
M.J .: Now, as we have been through that experience, we insist, because between those who do not understand, and the language is a barrier, and they say to everyone that “Yes, yes, yes!”, You know that there are things that they have not understood. So, you say to yourself, “Let’s start again from the beginning.” Her children are schooled here, they already speak Spanish, and they act as interpreters among us. The parents immediately asked us for a television, to become familiar with the language. Children, meanwhile, never miss class, they are super responsible. They keep the mail, the invoices … everything! They are super respectful.
Today you have gathered in your house, but you have also been in his. You have a certain relationship …
M.J .: Yes, we have gone to his house more than once, and every time you go they receive you with tea, nuts, cake … Everything. And, in addition, you take home a rice tupper or part of the bread that they have made themselves at home …
M.J. Anitua: And through all this process of mutual knowledge, a relationship almost like a family is born, something different arises.
A .: There are times when they tell you about their needs. For example, they could use some bikes, because they move a lot. We could go to the store and buy them, but that is not the relationship we want to have with them, a power or paternalistic relationship. The point is not to buy them a bus voucher or the pool card, but to teach them how to get around on the bus, or to enter the networks of civic centers. We look for other ways to help you meet your needs.
M.J .: Or the mother, for example, tells us that she would need a friend. They would like to have more time with us to learn to go to the mountains, or to walk to the swamp, or to the park of Judizmendi, but we have the time we have, which is not much either.
A .: They make a lot of life together. When you go to his house, if the four are not there, there are three, and the fourth is that he is in class. In one of his drawings that is precisely what appears: a house, with a path that resembles a place to walk …
M.J .: Your schedule is full of appointments with doctors, which invites us to think that there is a lot of somatization. They have appointments and more appointments. They have had traumatic experiences, and now they are emerging all their sufferings. Very few members of a refugee family have no health problems.
A .: And since there is no longer a healthy subject but an insufficiently studied one, these, as they have multiple annoyances and very strange things, are studied from head to toe and, in the end, of course, they find some type of insufficiency. Of course not! I am afraid that they feel sick, because it is one thing to have a disease and another to feel sick.
What have you learned from this process? What is it giving you?
A .: At the moment, it has reaffirmed our belief: trusting people usually works. On the other hand, personally, it hurt me to have an empty apartment, so that issue is solved. I think that for our son it is also important. And we have new friends …
M.J .: I don’t know if we have learned anything new, because we already have several experiences in this regard, but it hasn’t hurt us. And our son, for example, defends them, takes care that whatever happens, this family has a place to live. For Carlos, it is a way of learning to share, to be generous, to think of others.
Nerea Melgosa, director of Equality and Human Rights of the Provincial Council of Álava
(Basque Autonomous Region, Spain)
“Personal involvement is one of the keys to success”
The current director of Equality and Human Rights of the Diputación held, when we interviewed her in the spring of 2019, the position of councilor for Coexistence and Diversity, and Employment and Sustainable economic Development in the city of Vitoria-Gasteiz. It is inevitable that the municipal perspective is present above any other throughout the entire interview.
How did the conscious rental pilot project start?
It was a fluke, actually. Before the meeting that I held in June 2018 with María José Anitua and other ADCE organizers to prepare the conscious contracts congress in November of that same year, she had been meeting with the head of the Coexistence, Diversity and Social Affairs Service of the Vitoria-Gasteiz City Council, Estitxu Pereda, and we knew that there was a serious housing problem. The greatest demand for housing came from migrant people and refugee families. We saw that people were doing their itinerary of insertion and inclusion in society, because the reception was being very good, but that the integration was not real, because there was no housing. We knew that after having been working with these people, many of the permits could be “dropped” due to housing. So when the organizers of the congress came to explain to us what collaborative law and conscious contracts were, it occurred to us to propose applying it in the case of refugee families’ homes.
What is the housing policy of a city council?
Housing policy has two parts. On the one hand, we have people who do not want to rent their home due to fear and ignorance of the tenant of what their home is –which also has sentimental value–, and on the other, we have a sector of the population that wants to bring everyone together. migrants in the same neighborhood or building. It did not seem appropriate to us to apply this measure, we have never opted for this way of working. So when someone comes telling us that they feel capable, that they have another way of working –a conscious contract–, that they are capable of negotiating, of talking and of knowing each other… it seems to us a matter of common sense. In this case, they were talking about putting the owner of a house in contact with the refugee family… We, as a City Council, could not leave these people alone. They may have had sufficient legal knowledge of conscious contracts, etc., but it is equally true that the world of refugees was unfamiliar to them.
Is there anyone who is familiar with and working with refugees at the municipal level?
In Vitoria-Gasteiz, and in the Spanish State, there are three, mainly, the associations that deal with the issue of refugees through the European Union: Red Cross, Cear and Accem. We, as a City Council, work at the refugee table. We have been working on the issue for a few years, the situation of families, etc., although they are very few, sadly, because the contingent that is arriving here, and throughout the Spanish State, is being very scarce. We know the peculiarities of each of the associations, and how we can work with each of them. It seemed to us that the Arteale Foundation could work with Accem, a very easy NGO to work with and a very interesting journey. It was a matter of networking, of building that fabric or that web. The more consistent that web is, the better city we will make, because the base will be laid. I like people to get to know each other, to work with each other, weaving the web. One thing led to another, a commission led to a meeting, and we started weaving.
What do you think of the cultural and language barriers? They always come up …
When you start any pilot experience, you have to start with the easy. I was sure that Accem would choose a comfortable family to start working. We all wanted the experience to go well. We chose a family with a Spanish language and a culture similar to that of our. I found it incredible that María José Anitua offered her own apartment for the experience. Personal involvement is one of the keys to success. The emotional plays a lot… This is a personal commitment, a new and very pampered project, and it has to be that way. It is like a baby. Before leaving it to the community, you have to take care of it, see its defects and possible improvements, protocolize the process, until it is extended to the entire community. Go slowly, without exposing refugee families to one-day headlines. They are people with big backpacks on their backs, people we have to take care of. And, equally, we have to take care of the people who are putting their professionalism on the table, exposing their heritage and that of their family, and their own being. So step by step.
You have mentioned the Red Cross, Cear and Accem as the three associations that deal with migrants at the European Union level.
Every refugee family has an arrival process, accompanied by these associations. The family receives an economic amount, because the European Union pays for these families for a period of one year. After the year, the family can refer and go to another place; for making regrouping, for example. They are free to do so, but, on the other hand, they have already asked for their residence permits, and by the time they receive the permits, they lose their rights and the entire process that has been carried out with that family is invalidated. In the end, it is not worth anything, because they stay again as irregular migrants. It’s very hard. There are people who have invested in training courses, etc. And the case of sons and daughters is also very worrying. The first year, they request their papers, they are not granted them, which is why they request an extension of time. The following year, they may not be granted the papers, and may have to leave, or remain in an irregular situation. We are talking about refugees, migrants who enjoy more advantages, but there are many people who have jumped over the fences, and who are irregular. They don’t have a check or anything.
What role corresponds to the institutions?
Administrative procedures are from yesteryear. Public-private collaboration exists, but it doesn’t stop flowing. The administration is still very archaic, nineteenth-century and Jacobin. You have to take steps forward. But the three historical territories of the Autonomous Community act differently. I think that first are the ideas of the associations, and second, the actions of the institutions. It is dangerous for the institution to start with these issues, because the administration’s rhythms and procedures slow down the entire process. Furthermore, as María José Anitua usually says, it is a matter of people. It is much better for private initiative to go its way. Later, we will meet again. This does not mean that the institutions do not have to legislate, by means of ordinances or establishing protocols of action and social clauses, or working a certain formula to pave the way, but the initiative must be carried out by private entities.
According to different opinions, it is not necessary to legislate more, it would simply be necessary to apply and interpret the existing laws properly.
If it is not to legislate, it is to protocolize, to leave a mark, to mount wigs, because at the slightest political change, a project, however interesting it may be, can be cornered to a minimum. It is necessary to record the continuity of the project, so that, even if it is on the part of the opposition, it can be held accountable for it. Training is needed, sensitivity is needed, and it is necessary to be very vigilant, because our tendency is to return to the previous situation.
What future do you see for this new type of conscious contract?
It is a practice that is going to spread, but I think it is time for the administrations to make a pattern. The work of private entities is fine, but when it is necessary, the administration needs to intervene. When something is working, as a novelty and as a pilot experience, and it is proven that it is giving good results, I think the administration has to work. These projects for renting flats, guardianships, inclusion, etc. work with various associations. The Department of Housing of the city of Vitoria-Gasteiz, or the Department of Welfare of the Basque Government, are working on it… Housing is a problem, because it is a necessity. In the three Basque capitals there is very little housing for rent, and work is being done with different associations that have apartments, Caritas, for example. They have floors of the church, or from family donations, and they work on integrated projects of the person in matters of training, education, employment and housing, and they do it in collaboration with different administrations. Conscious contracts and the Arteale Foundation can go the same way
